Friendster: power outage caused problems

By Izah Morales INQUIRER.net MANILA, Philippines â For the past few days, subscribers to the online social n etwork Friendster were complaining about having unknown people in their friends â list. It happened right after the website announced that it was undergoing maintenanc e. In a recent blog entry, Friendster explained that the power outag e in their outsourced data center in Santa Clara, California caused the downtim e. Friendster said its servers are located in Santa Clara, California along with o ther 50 companies. Friendster said it was not the only company that experienced the unscheduled do wntime. âAs a result, Friendster, as well as a number of other online compan ies, experienced unscheduled and unavoidable downtime. At this time, Friendster is back online and our team is working quickly to restore everything back to n ormal,â the company said. âWeâre working through the friends list update for every userâs account now, al l 85 million of them. All friend lists will be back to normal shortly,â added J eff Roberto, Marketing/PR director of Friendster.com in an e-mail message to IN QUIRER.net. The Friendster team also clarified in their blog that despite the inconsistenci es in the number of friends, the original data for a friendsâ list is not lost and is intact. A third of the traffic going to Friendster are contributed by Filipinos or at l east the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses coming from the Philippines, David Jo nes, vice president for global marketing of Friendster, told INQUIRER.net in an inter view early this year. Of the 39 million unique visitors recorded in March 2008, about 13.2 million un ique users are from the Philippines, Jones said. Thus if there are 14 million I nternet users in the Philippines as of 2007, about 98 percent are going to Frie ndster. The Friendster executive has said these figures indicate that Filipinos make up the biggest population of Friendster users in the world, even surpassing the U nited States, where the service was originally launched.