Jan 14
Flickr is down!!! Run for your lives
Following a scheduled maintenance the popular photography site Flickr.com went down and stayed down for the better part of the weekend.
It all started when George Oates posted this entry to Flickr’s dev blog on Saturday.
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 behavior 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.
The downtime expectations were a bit off and flickr was down all night and some hours on Sunday which I truly understand. Time estimates are usually made in a conservative way, always allocating some spare time to tackle some last minute problem. Apparently this last minute problem was serious.
But the main thing that struck me as quite hilarious was the reactions to the downtime either on twitter or blogs. People literally panicked. All those photos gone without publishing. All those groups without a constant stream of photos to their pools. Quite sad.
All this commotion got me thinking what would happen if Facebook went down for a couple of days. Or even the worse if Gmail went down.
In this day and age how can we survive without these little tools that enable us to communicate?
What would you do if Gmail, Yahoo and Facebook were down for two days? Leave a comment, I want to hear about your doomsday scenarios.
4 Comments so far
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I think the main distinction to be made here is between what is essential or not. The only service I use for anything essential is Gmail. I don’t use flickr (and the ToS disallows it) to sell my work or directly promote myself as a paid photographer.
That’s one of the reasons I opted to buy extra storage on Gmail (even if I still don’t use it), because I don’t want to rely on a service that is free to me, i.e., “don’t look a gifted horse in the mouth”. This way I have at least a moral “right” to complain if things don’t run as smoothly as they should (why not an effective right? Because any contract over hardware, software, or services nowadays removes all responsibility for the provider for losses incurred by the failure of their services…)
It is really sad… it is sad that we have a good part of our life depending on those online services.
In theory we always have a backup option…
Sad but true.
Google won-t go down. It can’t go down. Google Search is my main tool of reference and things would get rather complicated without it.
Nevertheless, life still goes on, even if in a different way. While serious, it wouldn’t be life threatening.
Anyway, that very perspective is what keeps a lot of companies from going completely on-line, even in a age where on-line IT looks more better by the day…
Have fun!
I really prefer to own my things. I have my emails routed through Gmail for it’s spam filtering. And sure, my web host could go down, but I would still have everything backed up locally. Right?
Think I better go now and check.