Heatwave Shuts Down MySpace.com

The Website that has bested Yahoo and Google as the number one online destination in the United States was a side-victim of the recent heatwave to hit the US. While rendering inoperable the California power infrastructure, the heatwave also knocked MySpace.com offline. The cumulated downtime exceeded 12 hours, a period when the online social lives of its users were put on hold. While the company's servers where down, the site featured a message from founder Tom Anderson informing the visitors of the problem at hand and delivering a Flash game of Pac-Man as a substitute for its usual services. "The area where MySpace's servers are stored had massive power outages and the backup generator failed," a company representative stated. "With power resumed, the network is now up and running."

The company has faced increasing criticism over the way it handled the situation and over the fact that it took no measures to prevent the power outages when it could easily have done so by diversifying its data center positioning or through emergency third-party power back-up systems.

Analyst have suggested that MySpace.com needs to better ensure the continuity of its services through such power grid failure through proxy servers hosting cached copies of all its data, or through a data back-up management system that would administrate the terrabytes of information associated with the site. The downtime is another negative mark that MySpace.com adds up to a wave of negative publicity. The result of such a continuous trajectory will start to estrange even the most dedicated users from America's number one social site.