Flickr’s Fail Panda spotted as site suffers first outage 4 days after its revamp (Update: Now back online)

Yahoo gave its photo hosting site Flickr a major revamp this past Monday, but already — four days later — the service has suffered its first significant outage after going down at 22:00 PDT, 06:00 BST (though one Twitter user suggests the site has been down for an additional two hours).

UPDATE: Bye bye Panda, Flickr is back and working as usual after suffering four hours of down time.

The redesigned Flickr sports an entirely overhauled user interface, has a new Android app and — perhaps most notably — 1TB of free storage was made available for all users. But it seems there was more, as Yahoo also introduced a Fail Panda (it’s twist on Twitter’s famous Fail Whale?) which is making its first public public appearance for today’s outage.

The cute photo (below) actually comes courtesy of Flickr user toyokazu, but that doesn’t wash over the fact that the site is already experiencing issues keeping itself online, which could well be down to its users taking advantage of the gigantic storage options on offer.

The <3 of EU tech

The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!

Given that Yahoo has moved away from the freemium model, it is now competing more evenly with Facebook and others for your photos, so keeping the service online is an absolute must.

While Flickr holds a key advantage, in that it stores photos at their original resolution (sans compression), thist doesn’t amount to much if users can’t get into the service for sustained periods of time.

Hopefully these are just early teething problems that don’t manifest into anything regular.

We reached out to Flickr to see if the company can provide more details beyond this tweet:

Experiencing slowness or having trouble accessing the site? We’re on it, and are working to fix the issue as quickly as possible. #badpanda

— Flickr (@Flickr) May 24, 2013

The fact that Flickr is actively promoting a hastag (#badpanda) that highlights its own downtime is interesting. Most companies would prefer to avoid mention of their failings, but Yahoo/Flickr is embracing it.

Headline image via Getty Images