Photo sharing service Flickr is experiencing serious periods of downtime, just days after a releasing a major upgrade to the platform. At this point it’s not a total outage, with some users experiencing no difficulties, however other users have not been able to access the site for hours.
Flickr has acknowledged that there is indeed a problem, and tweeted to that effect:
[tweet https://twitter.com/Flickr/statuses/337820853867798528 align=’centre’]
The Flickr update on Monday overhauled the site’s interface by adding large, high-res photos, along with recently updating the iOS and Android apps. As a result of the iOS update, Flickr has seen a 25 percent increase in uploads from that platform.
It is thought at this point that the outage being experienced by some users is down to the additional load placed on the servers by the influx of high-res images being uploaded in the wake of the new update. Flickr’s 89 million users also had their upload allowance expanded to 1Tb, which may also have added to the problems.
If you are concerned about ever finding yourself unable to access your latest uploads, you can back up your Flickr account using SocialSafe. Simply download the free trial and add your Flickr account as an RSS feed to automatically download your most recent posts to your own machine.
At the moment SocialSafe can only back up your most recent photos via RSS, but we do have plans to add full support for Flickr in due course.
I like Flickr, because it has the following advantages
Basic account is free.
Cool social sort-of-thing
Lots of websites support Flickr integration
Lots of cool features, like geotagging, what model of camera took a photo, and more of the like.
Uses Creative Commons licensing