According to our tipster, who works for one of Sony's Internet service providers, MySpace's security team inadvertently banned Sony employees from accessing its site in the course of going after a spammer:

I just talked to MySpace's head of security and they are lifting the block.

Here's why Sony was blocked. They get their Internet through us. MySpace went after one of our customers for MySpace spamming. We terminated that customer because I hate spammers with a vengence, but then MySpace banned our whole [system]. In essence, MySpace believed we were just a hosting provider and not the actual Internet — i.e. providing transit connectivity where companies go through us to reach other companies.

Oh and it wasn't just Sony... Los Angeles County government along with Orange County government offices use us for transit. So they were also blocked.

We were emailing MySpace for a few days, but they didn't believe we provided anything more than dedicated servers. We believe the only reason MySpace finally unblocked our network was because we sent them a link to your story.

We were scratching our heads as to why MySpace blocked Sony when Sony spends so much money advertising movies and music.

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)

The story: Two British guys adopt a lion cub in 1969, raise it for a couple years and then release it into the wild. Later, the pair go to to Africa to visit their old friend. Despite warnings that the cub will no longer recognize its old friends, it decides not to maim them. Or something. Anyway, watch the clip below and trust me, you'll squirt a few drops. 13 million others have, which is exactly why, during these troubled economic times, Sony Pictures just announced it plans to adapt the clip for a feature called "A Lion Called Christian."