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MySpace Down Due To Power Surge

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the those-electrons-aren't-moving dept.

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.

17 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 diersing · · Score: 5, Funny

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

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

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

    1. 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!"
    2. 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.
    3. 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 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'.)

    3. 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.

    4. 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.

    5. 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*.

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

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

  5. 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
  6. 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
  7. 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.

  8. 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!