Downtime notice == Up!

UPDATE 7, Sunday January 13
1:32pm PST: Phew! We’re back. And, I’m sitting in an IM window with our tireless Ops dudes as we watch the system closely. Hopefully, it’ll all be zinging away in no time.

UPDATE 6, Sunday January 13
12:23pm PST:It’s not raining, it’s pouring! Yes, folks! The site’s down again today, but hopefully for about one hour this time. It looks like somebody just kicked out a power cord in one of our data centres! after continuing our surveillance after yesterday’s outage, we spotted a few more bits and pieces to attend to. Trust me – these things are better done offline. Gah!

UPDATE 5
Human or dolphin ?

Thanks for hooking on to a feeling, TobTob.

UPDATE 4
7:34pm PST: And we’re back. Flickr is open again and ready to receive your photos. Get uploading!

UPDATE 3
7:08pm PST: Do you remember when we said we were almost back online? Well, that time we were joking, but this time is for real!

The latest estimate from our beautiful Ops team is 7:30pm PST.

UPDATE 2
6:07pm PST: We’re almost back folks. Just crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s before we throw the big switch. In the meantime, why not get outside and take some photos?

UPDATE 1
4:13pm PST: Anyone who’s ever worked in software probably knows that time estimates are tricky. Given that we’d prefer that Flickr be as close to 100% stable as we can make it before we go back online, we’re going to take more time to make sure that’s what happens.

It’s better to be safe than sorry when it comes to your precious photos, plus, there’s the added benefit of giving us all a chance to reflect on our serious Flickr addictions. Thank you again for your patience.

2:30pm PST: We started on a database upgrade and a few alters to the database structure last night. Given our scale, work like this takes a long time, and makes a definite impact on site performance.

You may have noticed today that the site is having lots of hiccups and that behaviour is generally pretty erratic. So, we’ve decided to take the site offline help things settle down. We’re anticipating a couple of hours is all we need at this point, so, we’re hoping to be back online around 4:30 PST.

Sorry about this! It will be one of those massages that ‘hurts so good’ and we’ll post updates here as we have them.