14 DAY TRIAL // There are all sorts of stories about people having their accounts disabled or content removed on plenty of sites for no reason or by mistake. Many times these mistakes can be rectified. One German photographer, though, woke up to find his five-year-old Flickr account deleted and all of his 4,000 photos gone with no way of bringing them back.
"Today I was a bit surprised when trying to log into my Flickr account. It didn’t remember I was logged in, but asked me for my password, knowing who I am. Then I was asked to 'create' a Flickr account," Mirco Wilhelm explains.
"Strange, because I already had an account … for the last 5 years with about 4000 pictures in it!," he wrote.
Turns out that a ticket he opened a few days earlier about a user who may have been taking credit for other people's photos, was the source of his predicament, a Flickr employee simply deleted his account instead of the one mentioned in the ticket.
Online services are by no means infallible, even paid ones, and sometimes things happen that are out of anyone's control. What's more, people make mistakes, there's no way of getting around.
But this is why things are built with failure in mind. In this case though, a simple mistake by a Flickr employee became much bigger since there is no way of restoring the content of deleted accounts on the site.
This meant that, after Flickr realized the mistake all it could offer was an apology, his account restored and a paid account for free for four years. But none of the content was going to be recovered.
Later though, after his story got quite a lot of coverage and people riled up, Flickr contacted him saying that it will try to recover the data, but the site made no guarantees. Thankfully though, in the future, Flickr will be implementing a system in which accounts along with the photos can be restored if they were deleted in error.
"Yesterday, Flickr inadvertently deleted a member's account. Flickr takes user trust very seriously and we, like our users, take great pride in being able to take, post and share photos," Flickr said.
"Our teams are currently working hard to try to restore the contents of this user's account. We are working on a process that would allow us to easily restore deleted accounts and we plan on rolling this functionality out soon," it added.