MANILA, Philippines – For the past few days, subscribers to the online social network Friendster were complaining about having unknown people in their friends’ list.

It happened right after the website announced that it was undergoing maintenance.

In a recent blog entry, Friendster explained that the power outage in their outsourced data center in Santa Clara, California caused the downtime.

Friendster said its servers are located in Santa Clara, California along with other 50 companies.

Friendster said it was not the only company that experienced the unscheduled downtime.

“As a result, Friendster, as well as a number of other online companies, experienced unscheduled and unavoidable downtime. At this time, Friendster is back online and our team is working quickly to restore everything back to normal,” the company said.

“We’re working through the friends list update for every user’s account now, all 85 million of them. All friend lists will be back to normal shortly,” added Jeff Roberto, Marketing/PR director of Friendster.com in an e-mail message to INQUIRER.net.

The Friendster team also clarified in their blog that despite the inconsistencies in the number of friends, the original data for a friends’ list is not lost and is intact.

A third of the traffic going to Friendster are contributed by Filipinos or at least the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses coming from the Philippines, David Jones, vice president for global marketing of Friendster, told INQUIRER.net in an interview early this year.

Of the 39 million unique visitors recorded in March 2008, about 13.2 million unique users are from the Philippines, Jones said. Thus if there are 14 million Internet users in the Philippines as of 2007, about 98 percent are going to Friendster.

The Friendster executive has said these figures indicate that Filipinos make up the biggest population of Friendster users in the world, even surpassing the United States, where the service was originally launched.