Social networking site and teen favorite MySpace was offline for at least 90 minutes Sunday, apparently because of a power outage in sweltering California, a U.K.-based Internet measuring firm said Monday. Other media reports put the outage as long as 12 hours.

According to Netcraft, MySpace was completely out of action for approximately 90 minutes Sunday starting at 6:40 p.m. PDT, with intermittent failures continuing throughout the night and into Monday morning.

With the site down, only a terse placeholder remained:

"hey everyone! there's been a power outage in our data center. we're in the process of fixing it right now, so sit tight. hopefully we'll be back online within the hour. its 6:40pm PST now. wanna place a bet? -Tom"

Tom Anderson is the co-founder of MySpace, the social site which was purchased by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. last year for $580 million. Earlier this month, Web metrics vendor Hitwise ranked MySpace as the world's #1 domain based on page visits.

MySpace operates two data centers, said Netcraft: one in El Segundo, Calif., the second in Tempe, Ariz. It wasn't clear which center went offline.

Some reports put the total outage at 12 hours -- as last as mid-morning Monday, some users were still claiming on the site's message boards that features were unavailable to them -- and credited it to a string of blackouts and brownouts that swept California over a weekend of record-breaking temperatures.

MySpace did not immediately return calls for comment.