Flickr hit with Tuesday morning outage

Yahoo-owned social photo site Flickr went dark Tuesday at around 8:50 a.m. PDT. The outage, which remains ongoing at time of this initial post, is keeping users from accessing all parts of the site, however photos that had been embedded on third-party sites are still able to be viewed.

An update on Flickr's official blog, timestamped at 9:51 a.m. PDT, says "all hands are on deck," and the problem will soon be resolved. That was followed shortly thereafter by a post at 10:05 a.m. PDT saying that that outage "shouldn't be too much longer!"

Flickr's last major outage, which took place back in February 2007, resulted in the company revealing some details about the immensity of the photo sharing site, which at that time was serving close to a billion photos a day.

More details as they come...

Updated 10:55 a.m. PDT: A Yahoo representative had no details on the nature of the outage, but it appears to be a problem with the Web servers rather than a data issue. Yahoo updated the Flickr blog to inform users that photos embedded into a Web site should still be appeared on those sites.

Updated 11:35 a.m. PDT: Flickr is back up and running.

Updated 12:01 p.m. PDT: Flickr released a statement on the outage.

"Flickr regularly makes routine updates to the site - and once in a blue moon we hit a snag in the road. Flickr is now back to normal and no data was lost during this morning's outage. Members who might have been uploading at the time should have received an error message, but should be able to share photos and videos now. We continued to serve photos to 3rd party sites throughout the service interruption. Thanks for bearing with us and feel free to let the team know if you continue to experience any issues."

Correction 11:35 a.m. PDT: This story initially misstated that embedded images could not be viewed during the outage.

[cvaldes1831]

Oh yes, cloud computing is great. Or will be someday, maybe five years, maybe ten. Maybe never...

[taylortrask]

Another major blow to the cloud computing evangelists.

[cvaldes1831]

Unfortunately, these are no longer isolated incidents.

As cost competition intensifies, we should be prepared to see more competent, pricey people get replaced by less competent, cheaper staff. There will be more security and reliability issues in the future, more attempts to breach systems.

Simply put, cloud computing failure is trending up.

[seanmolin]

Pretty big deal now that Flickr just received their FOUR billionth photo last week.

[wushu2004]

its back!

[Josh.Lowensohn]

Thanks--we noticed that too :D

[th3g]

And it's gone again....