Jul 24 2006
MySpace Outage
The unthinkable has happened, MySpace went dark for nearly 12 hours due to power failures in California.
“Due to the record-breaking heat in Los Angeles over the weekend, the area where MySpace’s servers are stored had massive power outages,” a MySpace spokeswoman said. “The backup generators failed. With power resumed, the network is now up and running.”
Well, just how many users are we talking about? According to ABC News:
Driven largely by word of mouth, MySpace has rapidly risen to become the second-busiest site in the United States, behind Yahoo Inc., according to comScore Media Metrix. MySpace’s 96 million registered users can expand their circles of friends through profile pages, photo sharing and other tools provided by the free, ad-supported site.
As a sign of the times:
In order to pacify MySpace users who may be hungry for a procrastination fix, the “site down” notice was accompanied by a Flash game of “Pac-Man.”
Wow, I remember when Pac-Man was cool. I wonder what the MySpace users are thinking. Well, here’s one comment from shanebole.com:
At least Tom was thoughtful enough to put up a flash version of PacMan on the main page to tide us over until life becomes bearable again.
OK, but what about the failure. How can this happen? What will be the effect? Cybersoc.com says:
There is likely to be quite a backlash from myspace users who will be wondering why myspace doesn’t have redundent systems in place
GigaOM.com concurs and has a screen shot from the outage:
it is hard to believe that a service this large could just have one data center. Have they not heard of redundancy? I am pretty sure there is more to the story.
Jordan’s Blog cuts right to the point:
For christs sake, you’re the most widely used site on the planet, you’re worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and probably do hundreds of thousands of dollars of ad revenue a day, and you can’t afford to have maybe a backup facility? Maybe a few servers in LA, a few on the east coast? That’s just completely unbelievable. Maybe it really just is some half-wit named Tom with a few servers in a colocation facility. Wow.
Keep your helmet on; the fallout from this will be big.
