Yesterday quite a few Flickr users had the fright of their lives when they thought their photos were lost forever. A technical issue, carefully explained today on Flickr’s blog, made the Flickr database serve random photos when Flickr users clicked on thumbnails, about 1/7th of the times. So, instead of your own personal photos, you could get just about anyone else’s.
Fortunately, Flickr engineers and technicians rapidly took control of the problem. After being offline for a few hours, Flickr was back to normal again, nonfunctional servers were restarted and every photo returned to its rightful owner.
Besides the basically anecdotal side to this story, one starts wondering about the degree of reliability offered by online services. With an ever-growing range of online services, we’ve ended up entrusting many websites with our data: personal photos, confidential e-mails, our most inner thoughts explained on a blog. It’s a bit daunting to realize just how much of your digital life is stored on servers located around the world and controlled by people you don’t even know.
In any case, I personally think there’s no reason to fret. I believe big companies like Flickr realize that the material that users upload is invaluable to them and they do their best to protect and secure it. I just trust them. Otherwise, I wouldn’t even think of storing my photos on their site. Would you?
