Flickr will be unavailable for a few minutes (hopefully five or fewer) this evening around midnight pacific time (0800 GMT) for server-mucking-about-with. It will be unavailable again Friday daytime, but that outage will probably last less than a minute and is hardly worth mentioning, so forget I brought it up.

Worth mentioning however are the outages experienced by about 60% of users worldwide for much of last Saturday and for almost all users a few hours late Monday night/early Tuesday morning. For this there is no excuse. The developers responsible for the bugs have been dealt the most severe penalties allowable by local law and are made fun of constantly by the rest of the team.

In fact, it turns out that the problem mostly stemmed from a diagnostic routine designed to discover system performance issues. That means that the slowdowns snowballed themselves into existence as we looked for problems. Hee hee. Or not ‘hee hee’, depending how late you were up on the nights in question :\

And, photos? Have a look at chlamygirl’s photos. They are fantastic! I have such a big backlog of photos to post now, it is embarrassing …