Flickr will be down for (at most) two hours this evening from 8 – 10 PM Pacific (find out what time this is where you are) while Yahoo! Network Operations upgrades our switches. Our "Flickr is having a massage" message may or may not be visible during this time, though any photos blogged beyond the Flickrverse will be available. UPDATE: 10:11 PM, we’re synchronizing the Tuna Blastrs now. We’ll be back online soon.

10:15 PM We’re back!

Miscellaneous stats to keep you entertained while we wait:

• We serve 12,000 photos a second at peak times — that’s 2,654,208,000 bits each and every second (8:20 PM)
• We set an all-time upload record yesterday: 2,070,075 photos in 24 hours! (8:40 PM)
• The Flickrverse has over 8.5 million registered members (9:00 PM)
• Over 10 million unique tags have been added to photos on Flickr (9:20 PM)

Photo from Kristal.