Myspace.com on Monday stated that their popular social-networking site suffered a pair of extended outages over the weekend because of power problems at a key data center in the Los Angeles area.

Myspace co-founder and president Tom Anderson told Myspace users in a message, "MySpace has been screwy since Saturday because of failures in both the main power supply and the backup generators."

A heat wave that has gripped California for a few days now was blamed for the problem. Tens of thousands of California customers have been without power because of the increased demand for electricity due to the heat wave.

Myspace's first outage started around 8:40pm EDT on Saturday night and was out for more than six hours. Then the second outage started about 9:30pm and continued until 9am Monday.

According to Netcraft Ltd., a British company that monitors Web site performance, MySpace was completely offline for about 90 minutes Sunday.

The rest of the time, the profiles were inaccessible as Myspace had a temporary page up that allowed visitors to play Pac-Man and had an outage announcement.

Netcraft analyst Rich Miller said, "it's unusual to see an outage like this where the systems that were in place clearly didn't work as intended. I'm sure they will be looking very closely at what happened to try to prevent it from happening again."