As many of you surely noticed, Flickr has been a little "spotty" over the last day. I’ve included an ‘MRTG‘ graph in this post so you can see just how spotty. The green part is traffic coming out of Flickr, and the blue part is traffic coming in to Flickr (image uploads, mostly). The numbers at the bottom are hours of the day, pacific time.

All the spikiness is, in technical operations jargon, "really bad". There are several things going on here: an attack and attempted hijacking by spammers (lame! – and now fully deflected), one of the load balancers hitting its throughput limit (lamer!) and a bunch of general network design decisions which, upon due reflection, were not quite optimal. A bunch of us are now at the data center fixing the latter two issues.

As a result, the Flickr website will be completely unavailable for a few minutes here and there later this afternoon and early evening (again, speaking in pacific time). We sorely regret the inconvenience, are doing our best to fix things, and will be back shortly with a zippy and pleasing site.

Did we mention that we’re hiring?