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MySpace Down Due To Power Surge

BenelliShooter writes "MySpace.Com - Undergoing Maintenance "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" That about says it... I suppose we'll see if they had proper back-ups. " Hah. The site says it was supposed to be back up as of ... 7:40 PST PM. Which was something like close to nine hours ago.

41 of 448 comments (clear)

  1. Wow... by rizzo320 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There must be something more to this. Wouldn't a site with this many subscribers be co-located?

    1. Re:Wow... by abscissa · · Score: 3, Funny

      There must be something more to this. Wouldn't a site with this many subscribers be co-located?

      Subscribers? You mean the people who aren't paying anything to meet teeny-boppers, shut ins, and FBI agents online?

    2. Re:Wow... by diersing · · Score: 5, Funny

      In a related story, the available bandwidth on campuses around the world has suddenly freed up.

    3. Re:Wow... by cwtrex · · Score: 4, Interesting

      this guy needs a rating "funny because it's true" Working at a community college, it is ridiculous to walk through the computer labs and see how many students are surfing on myspace alone ... and this isn't a quick 3 minute look and go some where else surfing attitude either. My dept has a student worker that is on myspace almost all day (not much of a worker lol). Anyway, with all the music, large pictures, music videos, and now personal videos being posted and looked at I am very much glad for our network today that it has some breathing room. (btw, I do have the day off :-p)

    4. Re:Wow... by Billosaur · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's pretty obvious that the idea behind MySpace was more to generate buzz than to actually run an efficient IT organization and world-class site. It grew from a little thing into a gigantic thing too fast for the developers and infrastructure people to adjust their mentality to the large scale. If the whole site is down, that means no rendundant data centers or colocations, or even worldwide coverage. A site can't grow as large as they have while neglecting the fundamentals.

      --
      GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
    5. Re:Wow... by sulam · · Score: 3, Funny

      They can't?? Don't you mean they shouldn't? Because they sure have! ;)

  2. Huh? by The+MAZZTer · · Score: 5, Funny

    I don't understand where there's a problem. >.>

    1. Re:Huh? by ettlz · · Score: 4, Funny

      The problem is some bugger out there put the plug back in.

    2. Re:Huh? by Blakey+Rat · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You know what pisses me off?

      Go back 10 years, when everyone was talking about the Internet revolution. Remember that? It was going to be great! Everyone can publish their thoughts, make their own site, share photos with their friends, instantly contact anybody!

      And now that it's happened thanks to sites like MySpace, LiveJournal, blogs, etc... suddenly everyone's saying, "oh those people are all idiots, they shouldn't be allowed to make websites!"

      In short; STFU, you elitist assholes. Sites like MySpace are the reason the Internet has grown enough that you can whine about MySpace on Slashdot.

    3. Re:Huh? by Mister+Whirly · · Score: 5, Funny

      I think you got it wrong. The only reason for the Internet is so I can be an elitist asshole...

      --
      "But this one goes to 11!"
    4. Re:Huh? by elrous0 · · Score: 5, Funny
      daughter can't get on MySpace and she won't shut up about it.

      Father: My daughter can't get on MySpace and she won't shut up about it.
      ISP Help Desk: I think I can help you with that. Are you at her computer?
      Father: Yes.
      ISP Help Desk: Okay, stand up.
      Father: Okay, I'm standing
      ISP Help Desk: Now slap your daughter in the face. This may require some force.
      Father: Okay, did it.
      ISP Help Desk: Now say "Shut up, you spoiled brat"
      Father: Okay, hang on a second....okay, did it.
      ISP Help Desk: Okay, did that fix the problem?
      Father: Yeah, that cleared it right up!
      ISP Help Desk: Glad we could help you, sir.

      -Eric

      --
      SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
    5. Re:Huh? by laffer1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      That is funny but it brings up a point. Why the hell do parents let their kids on the internet unattended? If a child meets an online predator online its the parents fault for letting their kid on the internet alone. I think the parents should be taken to court instead. Please tell people to watch their kids online.

      Calls like that happen. I used to do ISP tech support. The site could be down and its always the ISPs fault.

    6. Re:Huh? by QuantumFTL · · Score: 5, Interesting

      We live in an age where, due to widely-held populist views, and political correctness, it is a "sin" to act in a manner that is supposedly "elitist." Now my question is, what precisely is wrong with believing that people have different potentials, and contribute different amounts to society? Most of the great inventions in history were not created by common folk - they were created by people who were excellent in some way. Very intelligent, very wealthy, or maybe just very, very persistant. These uncommon qualities lead to uncommon acheivement, and most of us owe our lives to them (without modern technology, most of us wouldn't have lived to see 20, or maybe even 2).

      I think the reason for all this elitism towards places like myspace, livejournal, etc from /.ers is because we once believed that the "democratization" of this medium would lead to a renessaince, would be a life-changing event and would open the floodgates on good content. The problem is not that most people should not be allowed to post on the internet (that is ridiculous), but that most people really do not have anything to say that is valuable to anyone other than their friends. Because their audience is so narrow, the "value added" for the internet as a whole is very small compared to amount of noise this generates. Add to this the amount of bloggers who believe their insights are unique and wonderful (and yet are absolutely not) and the signal to noise ratio on the internet goes way down. I think many people on slashdot feel let down by this, it has made them more cynical about the masses.

      Not everyone has some brilliant insight to share with others - I know I sure don't, which is why I don't run a blog. I think myspace is great if you're a kid, and people should respect this, but I'd love to be able to tell google to ignore things like myspace/livejournal etc when conducting searches (by default rather than something I must do manually).

      So perhaps the "elitist" /.ers are going too far in saying something like this shouldn't exist, but really, what is so very wrong about being "elitist."

  3. Strange happenings at MySpace by Tet · · Score: 5, Informative
    So, I see two possiblities here. Either they're lying about the reason for the downtime, or they're uttlerly inept. According to the most recent figures I've seen, MySpace is the most visited site on the Internet for US surfers, and the 6th most visited site on the net worldwide. Are you seriously telling me that they don't have redundant datacentres?

    Hell, with a fairly limited budget, I set up two datacentres in an active/active configuration for the last bank I worked at, and that was only handling a 10 million hits a day. It took a while to get the database replication working right, but once we'd done that, it was all fine, and gave protection against total datacentre failure[1]. MySpace is way larger that we were, and they can certainly afford multiple datacentres to prevent an outage such as this. So why didn't they? As I said, the only explanations I can see are ineptitude, or that they're using this as an excuse to mask some other reason for the outage...

    [1] Not that a power failure should ever happen in a datacentre anyway. All of the ones I've used have had multiple power feeds from different suppliers, entering on opposite sides of the building, plus redundant UPSes with diesel generators for when the UPS runs out. If you're still having power outages with that sort of infrastructure in place, then something's seriously wrong. And if you don't have that sort of infrastructure in place, then you've chosen the wrong datacentre.

    --
    "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
    1. Re:Strange happenings at MySpace by Turn-X+Alphonse · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If a bank goes down you have major problems, if a social networking site goes down someone might not be able to reply to a message and misses a night getting drunk. You have to remember these arn't the same type of things and so majorly backing up MySpace isn't going to do MySpace any real favours. Where as a bank it's basic common sense.

      Remember when Livejournal went down? It didn't make a jot of difference now several months later.

      --
      I like muppets.
    2. Re:Strange happenings at MySpace by GNU(slash)Nickname · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Not that a power failure should ever happen in a datacentre anyway. All of the ones I've used have had multiple power feeds from different suppliers, entering on opposite sides of the building
      Where do you live that has more than one power supplier?
    3. Re:Strange happenings at MySpace by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      When your site pushes 40+ GBit/s of traffic, and has tens of TB of data in those databases, then you can talk shit. Until then, you should probably shut the hell up.

      As a professional in this industry, I can tell you from experience that redundancy at this scale is NOT easy, nor is it inexpensive even for someone as big as MySpace or Fox. Add to that the explosive growth that MySpace is constantly experiencing, and this is much harder than it sounds when you're also trying to keep up with existing growth.

      I can additionally tell you that I happen to know what data center they're in. The problem was not a simple power failure. The data center's UPS also failed, which took out the HVAC units. 120 degrees in a data center is not good for hardware.

      No, it's not a happy situation, but things like this do happen from time to time.

      -AC (ironically, the captcha for this post was 'coo1ing'.)

    4. Re:Strange happenings at MySpace by GNU(slash)Nickname · · Score: 5, Funny
      Lemme get this straight...

      You live in a city with redundant power grids? There are actually competing power distribution networks, with diversely routed feeders?

      Apparently, Enron was useful for something after all.

    5. Re:Strange happenings at MySpace by dattaway · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I do refrigeration for a large food wharehouse. When our power went out, we trucked in a 3000KVA generator and bolted the cables into our switchgear. When your business depends on power, you know how to make calls and get it QUICKLY. It cost us 120 gallons of diesel per hour, but we would have had a catastrophic loss without it.

    6. Re:Strange happenings at MySpace by darjen · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If a bank goes down you have major problems, if a social networking site goes down someone might not be able to reply to a message and misses a night getting drunk

      It's not about end users missing a silly message. It's about loosing millions of dollars in revenue when people aren't visiting your site.

    7. Re:Strange happenings at MySpace by mail_stripper · · Score: 5, Informative

      I work in a datacenter in the building where MySpace keeps their servers, near downtown LA.

      I can confirm that they/we had a power outage @ saturday after 6pm , and another one sunday. Needless to say there were a shit-ton of engineers here, some of them bringing in their children, wives, pets(redundant?), etc. I was here for nearly 13 hours after the power outage.

      The building provides 'UPS' to all of the tenants, and has *massive* diesel generators as well. Only problem - the failover system failed. This is the second time that this building's "UPS/Generator" system failed at a critical time - the last time was Sept 12th last year during the big ol' blackout ( http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/12/la.power.outage/ ).

      Nonworking generators *suck*.

      I suppose establishing a properly redundant infrastructure is made more difficult with such an exponential rise in popularity. But then again, excuses *suck*.

    8. Re:Strange happenings at MySpace by myth24601 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I can understand having power feed the building from two points and even two seperate dmarks for network connectivity. This would protect you from a failure in one part of your building and maybe even from an overzealous backhoe operator or goundskeeper on your property.

      The problem that I could see would be the overzealous backhoe operator down the street where all your power/network stuff ends up going allong the same roadside. Worked somwhere with the dual demark think setup.

        I worked in a place that had two buldings connected with a walkway so we ran two of our four T1 lines from one ISP and two from another ISP through the other building but all the lines were in the same ditch half a mile down the road.

      --
      No matter where you go, there you are.
    9. Re:Strange happenings at MySpace by astanley218 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Obviously, MySpace decided that this was NOT someone's job. I don't understand the tone of your post anyway. The original poster was only pointing out the tradeoff between a little downtime on your social networking site versus the money, time, and effort needed to create a redundant topology. I realize the issue of lost revenue if your site relies heavily on advertising incoming, and is down. But in the scheme of things a 2 days of downtime over the course of a year is going to lose them less money than they would spend maintaining those redundant datacentres. As the original poster was pointing out - banks and MySpace are not the same. While it may be our job to setup redundant hosting for a bank, it is certainly not MySpace's responsibility to spend their money making sure you can post comments to your buddies 24/7.

      just my 2c as an admin working in the field...

    10. Re:Strange happenings at MySpace by Software · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If this datacenter has any customers after having two generator failures in less than twelve months, I'm going to move to L.A. and start selling datacenter services. Apparently, folks in L.A. just aren't that bright. Seriously, why would anyone stay there?

    11. Re:Strange happenings at MySpace by ocelotbob · · Score: 3, Informative

      I work for a company that rents space in the same building as myspace. The big selling point for the building was that they would handle all that for us; they (supposedly anyways, the last year or so has shown otherwise) have massive battery banks and generators for all the downstairs colo suites. This building also has a number of banks which rely on the same facilities for various operations, like check and payment processing. I've got a feeling that there is going to be some serious head rolling when all this goes down.

      --

      Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses

  4. Crackspace by eldavojohn · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I use this to maintain loose connections with friends from highschool/college.

    Honestly, you know how addictive this site is if someone posts a story about it going offline to Slashdot and it's accepted!

    That site was making some crazy loads of cash. The advertising department was saying "we need web traffic!" and the developers were saying "oh, we'll get you web traffic!" and now the hardware department is saying "wtf?"

    Perhaps MySpace should be renamed to IcarusSpace?

    --
    My work here is dung.
  5. I think I did it by Matt+Edd · · Score: 3, Funny

    It went down at the same time my UPS decided to explode. I was on the internet at the time. I must have broke it.

  6. Its been ongoing since Saturday by falcon5768 · · Score: 4, Informative

    The site went down sat night, came back up then went down again sunday night. The page saying it would be back up is actually from when it went down Saturday.

    --

    "Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."

  7. Backups... by lxt · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...am I the only one praying they *don't* have proper backups?

  8. Other sites by Council · · Score: 4, Informative

    I notice that both Questionable Content and Penny Arcade are also down this morning. Someone suggested to me that they were all at the same datacenter. Is this true?

    Even though it could just as easily happen to me, it's still satisfying to say "haha, n00bs".

    Although I also note that the datacenter holding my server has on-property generators, which I assumed was pretty standard practice.

    --
    xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
  9. CrySpace by digitaldc · · Score: 5, Funny

    Obi-Tom: I felt a great disturbance in MySpace, as if millions of emo kids suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

    --
    He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
  10. Welp, here comes the troll. by Turn-X+Alphonse · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Well done Hemos, you just gave everyone another chance to slag off MySpace. People need to remember that just because something isn't for them (we have our blogs people), that is isn't instantly lame. Sure the web designs suck and 90% of the people there are guys just out for vaginal offering (like slashdot would be any different if it had women).

    Just remember, not everyone has the same values as Slashdot. A lot of the people on MySpace don't care if it's ugly or poorly written because they're having fun. Now as much as we geeks like to claim to be superior to everything short of the pope riding a giant panda, we need to learn to accept others values even if we don't take them.

    MySpace's subtitle should be "The social person's easy-blog" and maybe geeks here would grasp it's name better, but wouldn't that be dumbing it down so a geek would understand it? Hmmm....

    --
    I like muppets.
  11. Re:All I got by Cytlid · · Score: 5, Funny

    -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
    12345
    -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

      That's crazy... I have the same combination on my luggage!

    --
    FLR
  12. Slashdotted! by objekt · · Score: 4, Funny

    Anyone got a mirror of myspace?

    --
    -- Boycott Shell
  13. Re:Not Uncommon by m2k1 · · Score: 3, Informative

    They're not exactly running ASP code on IIS servers. They run Cold Fusion code in a third-party .NET thingy. As to be read here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=15703724&sid=1 90912&tid=95

  14. Public Service Announcement by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Kids, while mySpace is down and out, please visit your parents, greet the yellow light in the great blue room, and take a dip at the swimming pool. There's more to life than hanging out at a website. Enjoy your freedom while it lasts!

  15. It wasn't over use by data mining? by arthurpaliden · · Score: 3, Informative

    And here I thought it was because everyone, myself included, was testing the MySpace Data Mining tools released on Freshmeat last night.

  16. Is this the *real* reason? by brianjcain · · Score: 4, Interesting
  17. Christ, you're stupid. by apparently · · Score: 5, Insightful
    They lose money from lost advertising revenue, but they don't really have anybody to answer to except themselves

    They have to answer to the advertisers. The advertisers are their customers. The teenie-boppers are the product that they sell to the advertisers.

  18. To be fair, at least they have a page up about it by Tim+C · · Score: 3, Insightful

    When commenting, logging in, etc was broken here a week or so ago, we didn't even get an official announcement about it after the fact, let alone a "hopefully all will be fixed by..." page.

  19. Re:Time I said this by bsartist · · Score: 5, Informative

    That's why I first joined - I have several friends whose bands have pages there.

    The irony of it is that MySpace is a great way for non-RIAA bands to promote themselves and network with other bands, finding new places to play, organizing shows, etc. Slashbots continually harp about how bands should be doing that kind of thing, bypassing the RIAA in favor of self-promotion - but when the bands actually start having a little success in doing so, the slashbots all line up to rag on them for it.

    --
    Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!