MySpace outage confused with hack - puppies and kittens are safe
by Steve Ragan - Aug 12 2011, 07:08
The puppies and kittens are safe. Image: MySpace.
MySpace was down earlier this morning, and the site’s error message led some to believe it was hacked. The confusion is understandable, as the error message isn’t common, but it has been around for a while.
Users who loaded MySpace’s main page this morning, www.myspace.com, were greeted with a browser title bar that read: “All is wrong :( ”
The main display simply reported, “We messed up our code so bad that even puppies and kittens may be in danger. Please turn back ...now…* Have your pet spayed or neutered.”
Speculation on Twitter blamed Anonymous for the outage after YourAnonNews posted a link to the error page, and reported the message as a hack. A quick search for the wording of the message itself shows plenty of forum posts, and a history of the message being used by the antique social network.
Commenting on the outage, everyone’s first friend, Tom Anderson, said, “Attacking MySpace in its current state is kinda like steroid muscle heads pushing a kid in a wheelchair off the Santa Monica pier.”
Anderson’s Google+ post offered users a chance to play Pac-Man while waiting for the portal to return.
At 03:00 a.m. EST, the site was back online and working properly. While the main page displayed the error message for nearly an hour, other parts of the domain worked as expected.
It is currently unknown what caused the short outage.
In other related news, News Corp. lost $254 million on MySpace when it sold the site in June to Specific Media for a total of $35 million. According to paidContent, the sale and net loss pushed News Corp.’s Q4 net income down 22 percent to $683 million.
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