A company spokesperson said that the heat wave, which soared into the three digits in California's San Fernando, San Gabriel and Santa Clarita valleys, resulted in power outages for at least 100,000 homes and businesses in Los Angeles County.
West Hollywood, Calif.-based MySpace was disabled by 6:40 p.m. on Sunday for 12 hours. The site was restored as of 6 a.m. today. During the outage, site operators replaced the homepage with a game of Pac-man to keep visitors engaged. However, several competing social networking sites, such as Bebo, took the outage as an opportunity to recruit MySpace members over to their sites.
Many site members were critical of the company’s failure to have a more reliable power backup in place, especially for a site as heavily trafficked as MySpace, with an estimated 3 million visitors monthly.
Popular among many adult performers and professionals, MySpace has been in the hot seat recently from government officials for not providing adequate protection for underage site members. News Corp. was slapped recently with a $30 million lawsuit filed by an underage girl who blamed the networking site for her rape.
MySpace recently implemented a stricter child protection policy.