Myspace was once the king of the web. For years in its glory, the platform has provided early social media users a place where they could connect and visit memories they have uploaded to the web.
But in a server migration, the company lost a large amount of user data uploaded to its servers.
Here, user data uploaded to Myspace from its inception to 2015 may no longer be available.
"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," the company noted. "We apologize for the inconvenience."
In this incident, Myspace lost about 53 million songs from 14 million artists, but it wasn’t clear how much of that music was uploaded by users.
Myspace is a social media platform. Born in 2003, it was considered the largest from 2005 to 2009.
Allowing interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music, and videos, Myspace in June 2006 was the most visited website in the U.S., surpassing even Google.
But when Facebook was born, Myspace was quickly overtaken in the number of unique worldwide visitors. And with the rise of Twitter, Reddit and other platforms, even more users are lured away from Myspace.
Myspace then grew to be a formidable power in music hosting, to even become one of the largest library for digital music. The site was even credited with helping launch the careers of numerous artists. However, it eventually struggled and lost to services like Spotify.
Since then, the number of Myspace users has declined steadily in spite of several redesigns and updates.
But still, the platform has retain its influence on pop culture and music. In 2015, Myspace still had 50.6 million unique monthly visitors, and had almost 1 billion active and inactive users.
MySpace was purchased for $580 million in 2005 by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.
Since it failed to keep pace with other platforms, News Corporation sold MySpace in 2011 to a digital ad company Specific Media for about $35 million, before being sold along with parent Viant to Time in 2016.
Myspace in losing user data isn't actually new.
For those users who kept their accounts for years, some have complained on Reddit discussion and elsewhere about receiving messages from the company. Some Myspace users have long tried to recover their music by reaching the company directly.
In 2016 for example, a server migration had left some older files irreparably corrupted.
MySpace didn't immediately respond to a request for further comment.