MySpace is experiencing technical difficulties which have forced the social networking site off the internet.

The site has been offline since 2:40am on 24 July. A message posted on the site blames the outage on a power cut at its data centre.

"We are in the process of fixing it right now, so sit tight. Hopefully we'll be back online within the hour," the message says. "It's 6:40pm PST now. Wanna place a bet?" it asks.

MySpace has 95 million members and accounted for 4.5 per cent of all US internet visits in the first week of July, according to figures from web monitoring firm Hitwise.
The news about the site being down spread quickly among bloggers.

"It is hard to believe that a service this large could just have one data centre. Have they not heard of redundancy? I am pretty sure there is more to the story. One can only imagine how millions of MySpace users feel right now," Om Malik wrote at GigaOM.

Another user on Live Journal expressed dismay that the site was unavailable. "If Tom [Anderson, founder of MySpace] was here, I'd deck him in the face. This has turned out to be one of the worst days of my life."