Flickr performance problems
November 11th, 2004
I’ve noticed that Flickr has been having performance problems of late (mostly while I was developing a Flickr photo gallery plugin for WP). They mention them in FlickrBlog here. You can see their traffic graph for one of the problematic days there too. Flickr’s growing popularity is certainly stressing their systems. Also it appears that there was some sort of attack that contributed to the problem. So the problems appear to be due to network design decisions that couldn’t quite scale to meet Flickr’s new popularity, and malicious activity probably also due largely to their new popularity. Looks like it’s hard to be popular.
The Flickr engineers were able to respond reasonably fast and the issues seem to be mostly resolved by now. As popular as Flickr has become of late, I wonder what their bandwidth bill looks like.