Flickr Wipes Users 4,000 Photos In Error

[engine]

Flickr Wipes Users 4,000 Photos In Error [observer.com]

Major, major stumble from Flickr today—a Zurich-based photoblogger says Flickr deleted his account by mistake and lost his 4,000 photos.

Mr. Wilhelm was shocked when he tried to log into his five-year old Flickr account and was prompted to create a username. Then he remembered a support ticket he had submitted to Flickr a few days before, complaining about another user who had posted photos Mr. Wilhelm suspected were stolen. Had Flickr received his support ticket and deleted the wrong account?

In fact, that's exactly what happened, and the response from Flickr staff was discouraging and not nearly contrite enough.

Good thing he had the backups, but, it's still a lesson to learn on both parts. I'm surprised Flickr doesn't have a backup (i'm sure they must have), and anyone else relying on a cloud-based site should take heed, especially as all that link juice is wasted.

[J_RaD]

go cloud!

yea, its not for me.

[Fotiman]

From Twitter (@Yahoo [twitter.com]):

Happy to share @Flickr restored a mistakenly deleted member’s acct. We regret the error-reloaded all photos + gave 25 years free Flickr Pro

Good to hear they were able to restore the deleted photos.

[engine]

I couldn't believe they don't have a backup.
Just down to bad customer service, eh.

[rocknbil]

go cloud!

LOL . . . exactly.

I don't use Flickr. I've seen it around for years but don't play with these kinds of resources, so pardon my ignorance. Isn't Flickr . . . . free?

[Fotiman]

Flickr has both free and paid versions... you get more bandwidth/space with the paid version.

[Propools]

Yeah, Flickr just did it to us too. We were good yesterday, but today, Nada.
We've got backups but what the heck is going on in the cloud?
Must be a lightning storm or something.