We want to let you know that Flickr will be unavailable due to planned server maintenance next week Thursday and/or Friday (depending on your timezone). The outage will last around 8 hours from 12 Sep 9pm – 13 Sep 5am Pacific Daylight Time (UTC -7). If you’re not on the U.S.’s West Coast, these links might be helpful for you:

• Check the start time in your local timezone
• Check the end time in your local timezone

During that time, Flickr will be unavailable and the API will not be reachable. Nevertheless, our image farms will still be online and keep serving your images elsewhere if you have embedded them using static URLs (e.g. on your blog).

Why is this happening, you ask? All those photos need a lot of servers to store them. After five years with only minor updates to our infrastructure, we are performing important upgrades and moving equipment to highly energy efficient data centers (which Yahoo has pioneered over the past several years). Don’t worry, even though Flickr will be greener on Friday we promise your photos won’t be.

We will post another announcement next week when we’re closer to the event.