Flickr is currently a Yahoo service that stores a huge number of photos uploaded by users from every corner of the world, allowing them to publish, share and comment the images with friends or other members of the community. Flickr is an important part of the Yahoo's bright future because the giant portal added interoperability between the photo service and Yahoo travel to display detailed pictures for certain locations in the world. Although Flickr is a Yahoo service and owns numerous users this doesn't mean it is avoided by bugs and errors as the solution was affected yesterday by a serious problem with the photo request function.

It seems like the service displayed random photos instead of specific ones, letting users think their pictures were deleted from their account. A representative of the team reported that Flickr contained a bug that made their servers identify private request and random and displayed other pictures on every session or refresh of the page.

"Tonight's problem was a result a few of the photocaches going berzerk and instead of returning the correct image file when a particular photo was being requested, it just returning some random image that happened to be in the cache. The result was web pages which had some correct photos, and some random ones. And the random ones would change when you reloaded the page. This is not a permanent problem: the primary storage, the database and the software that runs Flickr is all fine. The problem was with the internal directory of a few photocaching servers - the bit that keeps track of which image files correspond with which photo URLs (and therefore items in the database)," Eric Costello sustained in a blog post published on the official page of the service.

The representative of the team also mentioned their servers encountered several problems after the fix of the problem and, although they were repaired, it's recommended to run a clear cache operation for your browser to remove all the random images saved in the history of the application.