Flickr will be unavailable for up to 2 hours this Saturday morning from 8am San Francisco time (GMT-8): see 8am San Francisco in your time zone.

We’re put in two giant new storage boxes. Well, not we. Some people who work for the same company as me, but whom I’ve never met, whose names I don’t even know.

S’funny, I remember very well the first six, then 10, then 20, then 40 servers Flickr had. I saw almost every harddrive (even touched a lot of them, just to annoy Jason and Cal). I remember our first (single) storage server, quickly obsoleted.

Now I don’t even know how many drives are going in tomorrow. It’s definitely in the hundreds. Crazy. We’re switching to a new arrangement with a new hardware class, capping off a year of insane growth and architectural reworkings which are all coming to sweet fruition over the next little while.

It’s just hard to believe how big it’s gotten! Now, in the time it take to go downstairs and get a coffee, thousands of photos come in. Maybe 10,000, if I stop and talk to someone for a while. Each one is deliberately uploaded by one of thousands on the site at any given minute.

Which makes us very conscious of all the people who are going to be annoyed, dismayed, inconvenienced or even experience withdrawl symptoms. Sorry in advance and thanks for your patience!