As more than one person noticed Thursday morning (Pacific; UTC-8), Flickr had a bit of the do-funnies. For you it is probably really annoying. For us, it is soul-wrenching – an exquisite torture – and something that we work our butts off to avoid.

To make an incredibly long story short by completely omitting it: we’re growing so fast that things that we used to count on a per day basis — like photo uploads — we now count on a per second basis. A completely new, amazingly well-appointed (and well-staffed) data center  is being constructed for us by our munificent comrades at the ol’ purple-on-white — and new hardware is on the way in the meantime.

Additionally, all of our finest nerds are busy replacing code which has gone a little ‘stale with scale’ with new well-hewn and perfectly-sequenced computer instructions to speed things up. Right now, the site is very fast, but we fear that tomorrow’s morning rush hour will give us a little more pain. If it does, remember we love you, we’re sorry, and we are all over it!

And if anything weird happens, or things take too long, in consideration of your fellow Flickrers, please do not re-upload images, post things again, refresh pages – because that just exacerbates the problems. And no-one likes an exacerbator!