Flickr.com displaying phantom images

Anyone viewing photos on the photo sharing site flickr.com over the weekend may have found themselves looking at pictures marked as private - including some which were not suitable for children. According to information on the flickr.com help forum, a network outage in the small hours of Saturday morning caused a problem with one server's image cache, resulting in the wrong pictures being displayed. Users' photostreams contained images from other users - both publicly available pictures and pictures intended for more restricted viewing. According to reports, this affected both preview and large size pictures.

Reinitialising the Flickr cache fixed the problem - but not completely, as many users still had the wrong pictures in their browser caches. However, reloading the page using Shift+Reload provided a remedy. In some cases users had to delete the entire browser cache in order to be able once more to view their own pictures.

Reference:

• Phantom Photos – My photos have been replaced with those of another, entry on the Flickr help forum

(ehe)