Due, apparently, to a faulty server migration Myspace seems to have “lost” pretty much every piece of content before 2016. Permanently.
Remember Myspace? Yeah, that social network everyone used before Facebook back in the early noughties. What? You didn’t know that it was still around? Well, it is still around, but it’s also significantly smaller lately; not because most of its users migrated to other social platforms. That happened a long time ago. No no, Myspace accidentally lost most of its content: images, videos, and around 50 million songs from 14 million artists.
I say “accidentally” since that’s what the company alleges, but some users are far from convinced. I mean, how does something like this happen?
I'm deeply skeptical this was an accident. Flagrant incompetence may be bad PR, but it still sounds better than "we can't be bothered with the effort and cost of migrating and hosting 50 million old MP3s."
— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) March 18, 2019
Apparently, it all happened around a year ago, but we’re just hearing about it now. Myspace itself blames the massive data loss on a faulty server migration. At some point, users started complaining that older content was unavailable to them, and nobody could figure out why.
According to a report from The Guardian, it’s only around the summer of 2018 that Myspace started to tell users what had really happened. But if you visit the site today, you will see this banner at the top:
“As a result of a server migration project, any photos, videos, and audio files you uploaded more than three years ago may no longer be available on or from Myspace. We apologise for the inconvenience and suggest that you retain your backup copies. If you would like more information, please contact our data protection officer.”
All that Internet history, gone. Just like that. Which reminds me (and should remind you) that this could happen to any data – on the Internet, or otherwise. I wouldn’t put too much faith in backups.
What does this mean for Internet culture? Here’s a good analysis.
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