A tipster tells us that when Sony employees in L.A. try to log onto MySpace, "it directs you to google.com." Bizarrely, Sony's IT staff is saying it's MySpace's fault.

Our tipster speculates: "Revenge for all the crap services that MySpace provided to Sony as a studio? Maybe." There'd be a ha-ha joke about how not being able to log onto MySpace's unusable site is a kindness, except that Hollywood studios, which set up pages for their movies to promote them, actually need to access the site. Here's the memo about the outage:

From: Brian Franke
Sent: Thursday, May 14, 2009 1:32 PM
To: Interactive
Subject: MySpace.com Update

Folks,

Just wanted to let you know that we are looking into the MySpace.com redirect to Google.com issue.

It appears to be on the MySpace end (unexpectedly), and has been escalated to their network team.

No ETA yet on a resolution.

Please contact me if you have time-sensitive MySpace deliverables, and we can discuss options.

Regards,

Brian

—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-

Brian Franke

Executive Director of Technology

Sony Pictures Imageworks Interactive

Update: Brian Franke's colleague Nancy Kim, director of digital communications strategy at Sony Pictures Entertainment, sent us this email:

Hi Owen,

Can you please remove this article?

Not sure where you received that information? As Sony is certainly not "banned".

Please feel free to call me if needed.

Thanks!

Nancy

So now Sony has two problems: A ban by MySpace, and a digital communications strategy which seems to involve denying reality.

(Photo by xurble)