OK, you are right. Flickr has been getting a lot of massages lately (the site has been down for maintenance something like 3 of the last 5 evenings for an hour or more at a time). We really do apologize for the inconvenience to all of our wonderful users out there. But please know that we do not take this lightly, and without the work we’ve been doing on the Flickr database of late, things could even be worse. :)

But in addition to the database overhaul, we’re adding many new servers to our growing collection, and will soon be bigger, better, and faster than ever. And when we’re out of Beta, inconvenient maintenance down times will be few and far between, and we’ll even be able to give you more than 6 hours of notice.

It is now 9:30 PST, and we expect to be down for another 1-3 hours, depending on how smoothly things go.

And at 10:50, we’re back online. We’re sorry, and we love you.