Service Outage Puts Crimp in Flickr Upgrade

Yahoo! is scrambling to solve a major service outage for Flickr, the photo-sharing site that received a major revamp just a few days ago. The stumble comes at a particularly bad time, given the high marks Yahoo! was receiving from pundits and customers for opening a full terabyte of free storage to shutterbugs. The company announced the outage on Twitter this morning and promised to resolve the issue “as quickly as possible.” Not all users are experiencing problems.

The new Flickr is part of the turnaround plan CEO Marissa Mayer launched to save Yahoo!, which has suffered for years from an inability to leverage its massive user base into ad dollars. The most talked about new feature is the 1TB of free storage, which puts Flickr above all other photo services for sheer (unpaid) storage space. The move hearkens back to Google’s own strategy of offering news-making storage capacities for its free Gmail service years ago, and it’s worth noting that Mayer is a former Google executive.


But there’s more to Flickr’s revamp than photo storage. The site has a new interface that makes photos much bigger on your personal page. That’s a far cry from the former layout and one that has met with mixed reviews. Some user like the larger images and tools for sharing images with friends, but many users have responded negatively to the new layout. Yahoo!, for its part, has been monitoring Flickr forums and has communicated with disappointed users there. The company says it is taking feedback into consideration and that further improvements can be expected.