Intermittent Network Problems [update: now resolved]

If you’ve been using Flickr today, you might have noticed intermittent problems: slow loading, pages failing to load complete, strange or incomplete results and things like that. These are the result of networking problems at our primary data center which have been recurring all day. And all day, we’ve believed those problems to be at the point of resolution, but then they turn around and bite us again. Ouch!

As usual, all your photos and data are completely safe. (We use multiple data centers which are staffed 24/7/365 and monitored from several NOCs around the globe and have everything backed up live.) However, while we switch back and forth between the old and new load balancers and networking gear, the intermittent problems will continue (Flickr is a monster when it comes to networking gear: with over a billion images served on the biggest days, we use a lot of bandwidth and have very intensive needs).

A dedicated team of hardworking supernerds is working on it now and we are all quite apologetic. Your continued patience is appreciated and we should have this resolved soon!

Update, 7pm pacific time (UTC-8): we seem to be running smoothly now and all’s well.