More Troubles At MySpace
Since this morning, we have been noticing increased comment activity on our previous post about MySpace outage. It seems a lot of people are having trouble with the service, and accounts are being deleted. I would have ignored this trend for a wee bit longer, but Mashable is finding similar comments, so this is a bigger problem. The story has been dugg already!
It has been a hard couple of weeks for the largest social networking site in the world. Soaring temperatures caused power outages in the greater Los Angeles area, knocking out the power in one of the hosting centers that house MySpace. It was not the Equinix data center, but instead the InterNAP data center that went out. Fox Interactive President Ross Levinsohn says the company is working hard to beef up its infrastructure, and adding redundancy.
Frankly, it is a big surprise that the service hasn’t had a hiccup before, though it has had its share of non-tech problems. According to Hitwise, Myspace.com has achieved a 3814% increase in visits over two years (comparing the market share of visits for the week ending July 22, 2006 versus the week ending July 24, 2004) and 140% increase in visits since the same time last year (week ending July 23, 2005.) Hitwise estimates that MySpace accounts for about 81.24% of the total social networking market.
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Myspace have had problems all day, myself or no friends can login. Now the Login form is not on the page??
Just another reason why I refuse to use MySpace. They seem to be slowly falling apart.
hyper growth can be a problem. how fast has the service grown… that shows they must have infrastructure issues.
They are switching data centers, they must have terrabytes of data to move.
This may be them actually trying to solve the infastructure issues and breaking the service during the interim.
Yeah it has been havin problems all day but what ever is wrong it is aparently gettin better cause now when you search for people and you click on their profile you can actually view it now, and some of the people I know are becomming able to login, though I nor my sister has.
I was VERY upset this morning when I discovered my account was showing it was deleted! With no rhyme or reason whatsoever. And as of this afternoon I still could not access my page – or anyone else’s for that matter.
I suspect Matt is correct here. The rumors is that the InterNAP data center in LA held their authentication database (usernames and account info). They may be trying to distribute that database to multiple locations, and keep it in sync across WAN distances. As Barbie might say, “coding WAN applications is hard, lets go shopping”. As far as “switching data centers” – come on, Om. If they were really switching data centers, they would just copy one disk array to another, at Fiber Channel speeds, then drive it the 10 minutes to Equinix LA, power it up, and go.
These are just growing pains. MySpace has done some good things to help manage them, like get CDN’s and carrier neutral colocation. Not enough, evidently.
“Frankly, it is a big surprise that the service hasn’t had a hiccup before”
Huh? MySpace hicups all the time. I don’t visit often, but it seems like half the time, I get transient errors when I click to a profile or a group, or something. About a quarter of the time I get repeated errors about a multiple profiles, groups, or even entire features being off-line for service for some substantial amount of time. What’s worse, their error pages tend to be redirects that remove all trace of whatever I was originally trying to get to.
It is suprising that it hasn’t gone down completely before.
I’d just like to let everyone reading this know that if you were getting a password error like I was, it’s possible your password was truncated to 10 characters. Mine was 12 characters, and the last 2, (since the outage this morning) mysteriously disappeared. Try it, it takes 2 seconds.
Later…