Sporadic MySpace outages make emo kids even angstier

Last weekend, the 12-hour outages on MySpace sent the News Corp.-owned social-networking site's young user base into disarray. The site tried to mollify the situation with a game of Pac-Man, but it wasn't particularly effective. Rumors abounded that some profiles may even have been deleted forever. (It appears that those were, well, rumors.) Perhaps not coincidentally, some people started talking up Bebo, a British social- networking site, as a "cooler" alternative to MySpace.

Then, on Monday morning, MySpace regained its server power and things seemed to be back to normal.

But now: They're baaaaa-ack! On Friday morning, the blogosphere began buzzing with the news that an unknown portion of MySpace profiles were inaccessible, displaying messages that say "Invalid Friend ID. This user has either cancelled their membership, or their account has been deleted."

This is, however, nothing like last weekend's power fizzle; this mini-outage does not appear to affect all MySpace users, nor has it shut down the main site, because it seems to be limited to profiles. There is no official word from MySpace yet about what exactly the problem is, and as of around 10 a.m. Pacific time, it hasn't ended yet. But despite its limited scope, the new outages have inspired a smaller version of the panic from over the weekend--among the MySpace demographic, "deleted" can be a really, really bad word.

Twenty years down the line, when emo music, the genre most intimately connected to MySpace, is experiencing its third or fourth revival, some band will likely record a song about the Great MySpace Outages of 2006. (Even better that they happened in July. Those bands seem to have a knack for singing nostalgic tunes about teenage summers.) It'll probably be an angsty, screamy ballad called "OMG, WTF, Bring Back My Top 8."