Flickr down after update hits "snag in the road"

Network problems apparently sent photo-sharing site Flickr down on Tuesday afternoon.

Update: Flickr is back up. Full statement from the Flickr team below.

On Tuesday afternoon, Google was overrun by frantic users desperate to know the status of Flickr.com, the popular photo-sharing site. Let us help you out. Is Flickr down? It sure is. Will Flickr be down forever? Probably not. What caused Flickr to go down? Network troubles, probably.

In a post to the Flickr blog, Flickr guy Kevin Collins acknowledged the outage. "Ahoy everyone! Flickr is experiencing problems at the present time, and our engineers are all in the main engine room, working on resolving the issue," Collins wrote. "Please hang tight, and we’ll have things back for you as soon as possible. If we need to, we’ll post an update for you here."

It's been a rocky year for some of the most popular Web 2.0 sites. Gmail went down for a while, and then it went down again, and Google News ground to a halt in September. (Zombies might have attacked during that time. Who knows?) Craigslist and Twitter have also weathered some very public problems.

As Monitor correspondent James Turner wrote earlier this year, "Like a jazzy sports car that has never had its oil changed, the underlying protocols of the Internet have remained largely unchanged since it came into being in the mid-1980s. The Internet can be surprisingly fragile at times and is vulnerable to attack."

Or just general crowding. You'll know more when we know more. In the meantime, drop us a line here, or on Twitter, @CSMHorizonsBlog.

Update: A Flickr spokesman sent the following statement: "Flickr regularly makes routine updates to the site – and once in a blue moon we hit a snag in the road. Flickr is now back to normal and no data was lost during this morning’s outage. Members who might have been uploading at the time should have received an error message, but should be able to share photos and videos now. We continued to serve photos to 3rd party sites throughout the service interruption. Thanks for bearing with us and feel free to let the team know if you continue to experience any issues."