It is not exactly usual for major services on the internet, that are owned by big companies, to announce that they will be going dark for a considerable amount of time. Nevertheless, Yahoo’s photo-sharing site Flickr announced today that tomorrow it will be shut down for six hours, during this time the service won’t be available on the web and through mobile devices.
This is being done so that Flickr can undergo “planned maintenance” from 4pm to 10pm PDT tomorrow, July 25th. A site wide notice will be spread an hour before Flickr is shut down to ensure that none of the users are caught by surprise. During the black out, Flickr’s API will not be available as well. So other websites that use Flickr API to display photos on their website are out of luck as well, calls to the API will result in error code 105: “Service currently unavailable.” Both Yahoo and Flickr have not said exactly what will be gained from this maintenance, so there’s no saying if users will notice any improvements once Flickr come back up after six hours.