MySpace Offers Pacman During Power Outage

Posted on July 24, 2006

A power outage tonight at MySpace.com has the social networking juggernaut attempting to sooth millions of young adults with an arcade game that was popular during the 1980s. The humble Pacman offering appears underneath a message from Tom that reads:

"hey everyone! there's been a power outage in our data center. we're in the process of fixing it right now, so sit tight. -Tom"

The title of the page at the very top of the browser reads "We are Upgrading" but it seems clear that are just trying to correct the power outage.

GigaOm asks how could a large site like MySpace just have one data center?

But seriously, 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. One can only imagine how millions of MySpace users feel right now.

Mashable says this is a significant event and notes that MySpace users sometimes see the site's code.

It's pretty significant when such a massive site goes down for an extended period of time - can you imagine what would happen if Google, or even Yahoo, went offline for hours at a time? (In fact, I remember the outcry in May 2005 when Google suffered a DNS error, resulting in speculation that it had been hacked). With MySpace, however, it's almost expected: users regularly see errors and the code is notoriously poor. It's not clear whether this current downtime is caused by the power problem, or something else. I know a few people who are hoping it stays this way.

It is significant and the power is still out at MySpace now very early on Monday morning. If they don't have this back on by 7 or 8 AM today the grumps from MySpace users will probably start to get much louder. A free Pacman flash game will not appease the MySpace masses for very long.