The main Flickr site is down, but it looks like all of the relatively new photos are still showing without problems. They had a “temporary storage failure”, which affected about 20 terabytes of older photos. That’s a freakin amazing amount of photos. And to add to that, they’re transferring that 20 terabytes from one of their datacenters to another, a few thousand miles away. That’s some serious data transfer right there, but probably not a whole lot more than Flickr sees on a normal day.
It sounds like they’re gonna be bringing the site back online shortly, just so they’re “up”. They say some photos will be “unavailable”. Those photos will show up once they’ve all made it to the other datacenter. Here’s an update from the Flickr blog:
UPDATE [4:59pm, pacific time (GMT-8)]: Weather report – everything is still cool. We’re going to try to bring the site back online shortly (there will still be photos which appear as unavailable, and they will gradually fill in – no need to do anything on your part, dear user).
In the meantime, Flickr is running a contest. All you need to do is print the circles seen temporarily on the flickr homepage, color them in some neat way, and upload back to flickr once it’s back up. If your “coloring” gets picked you’ll get a free Flickr Pro account:
Because this sucks*, we thought you might like to enter an impromptu competition to win a FREE PRO ACCOUNT!
Just print out this page and colour in the dots. When the site’s back up, take a photo of your creation and post it to Flickr, tagged with “flickrcolourcontest”.
Team Flickr will pick a winner in the next couple of days, and that lucky duck will get a free year of Pro.
I won’t be participating as I purchased my pro account quite some time ago. I miss you Flickr! Please come back soon, I got some new photos for ya!
UPDATE: Looks like they’re having some issues with bringing the site back online, but the photos are still nice and safe:
UPDATE 2 [5:52pm, pacific time (GMT-8)]: We’ve had some issues bringing the site back online without this storage system but everything is still quite safe and we are working hard to get back as soon as humanly possible. One thousand apologies!
UPDATE 2: Looks like Flickr is back.
Well, now what?
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I don’t think anyone has any idea how many photos 20 terabytes are and how long it takes to move all of this……
Wonder what happened ????
Front page…..message.
Gosh…we need to “analise” how to spell “analize”…….
YAY…we are up and running.