MySpace.com has found more than 29,000 registered sex offenders with profiles on the popular social networking website — more than four times the number cited by the company two months ago.

After initially withholding the information, citing federal privacy laws, MySpace began sharing the information in May after the states filed formal legal requests. At the time, MySpace said it had already used a database it helped create to remove about 7,000 profiles of sex offenders, out of a total of about 180 million profiles on the site.

Officials said the figure has now risen past 29,000.

“I’m absolutely astonished and appalled because the number has grown so exponentially in such a short time with no explanation,” said Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who also had pressed the company earlier for sex offender data.

MySpace declined to comment on the figure, focusing instead on its efforts to clean up its profile rolls.

“We’re pleased that we’ve successfully identified and removed registered sex offenders from our site and hope that other social networking sites follow our lead,” MySpace chief security officer Hemanshu Nigam said in a prepared statement.