Geek & Mild by Sean Sperte

They’re back up now, after two and a half hours; but are quick to apologize (globally) on the site and warn there might still be residue weirdness.

§  Sean · 19 February 2007

Unbelievable. They’re down again.

§  Sean · 19 February 2007

Looks like they’ve figured out the issue and are back up … hopefully for good this time. There’s a lengthy explanation on their blog that was being edited and updated live during the outage. Here’s an excerpt:

To be clear, we regard this as a serious problem, but it is something that goes away as soon as we restart the malfunctioning servers […] We want everyone to understand that there are no permanent problems with any data, we have not been “hacked” and you don’t need to do anything in order to have your photos return to normal

And here’s the apology:

We shamefacedly apologize for the inconvenience and the scare. We understand that it probably seems very, very strange and we know that many people got the impression that their photos were lost forever. But they should all be back now, safe and sound. And everyone who works on Flickr’s engineering and technical operations teams are working double time to ensure that it never happens again. Thanks for your understanding and patience!

Interesting word choices: “Scare” and “lost forever.” That’s precisely my point about users’ security having been compromised. It’s not their defensive securities, but their emotional ones.

Like I said, it’ll be interesting to read reactions on this one.

§  Sean · 19 February 2007