I've been using imageshack to store images online for years before they went v2.0 at that time it began to suck and I switched to imgur which at that time started to offer premium services for free which means no image hosting limits whatsoever.
So recently I noticed that some images are not available to display, I didn't care too much and today I got an email explaining the situation.
Dear ImageShack users, on September 29th '15, ImageShack has
suffered a very large service outage. We wanted to take time
to explain what happened, and how it affected your accounts
as well as Image delivery.
During a routine maintenance, a small mistake crept up into
one of our management tools that caused all our of servers
to wipe out their operating systems as well as most of the image
storage systems. You may want to ask, how can something
small cause such a large issue? Don't we have backups.
And Yes, indeed, we do have at least 3 copies as backups
of all your images.
ImageShack has been around since 2004, during that time
we have grown to store billions of images, and used hundreds of
servers to deliver those images to the internet. We always
relied on automated systems that allowed us to keep our
team relatively small, so that we could pass to cost savings
to you, our users. Unfortunately, with system automation
comes a risk of a mistake such as described above.
The good news, we were able to restore most of the images,
and continue to deliver them to you pages. The bad news
is that we lost about 4% of all images, across all accounts
(paid and free). This means that if you have a page with
100 images embedded, there perhaps would be between
3 to 5 images missing. We sincerely apologize for this
loss.
We have decided to take some serious steps regarding
ImageShack as a service. We want to absolutely
guarantee that your images will be delivered to your pages.
We do not resize images, we do not impose bandwidth
limits like other image hosting sites do. We do not put
claim to your images, and we do limit ads next to your
images, so that anyone who sees your images have the
best experience possible. For us to be able to promise
that - our business requires a transition to pay model only.
So, what are the steps we are taking? We will be
focusing on users that ImageShack matters to the
most - Those users are the users who have paid
accounts. If you are a user with free account, and do
not plan to upgrade, you have until January 31st, 2016
to download your images. After that date, only
paid accounts are going to continue to exist at ImageShack.
We are doing this so that we can put time an effort
towards our "premium" users who depend on ImageShack
for their businesses and other important functions. We want
to give 300% more quality and performance to those users,
they have certainly paid and earned the right to have it.
If you have had a paid account before, or have a free account
today, please consider upgrading to paid. Our plans start
at $3.99/mo. However, until January 31st 2016, we will be offering
a huge discount of $18.99/year only, as our thanks
to all users who are patient enough to stay with us through
this transition!
Sincerely,
ImageShack Team.
TL;DR - they had an error in the upgrade which caused all of their servers to be wiped clean, so after restoring most of the shit (not all!) they decide to wipe out free accounts (wipe is the keyword here).... so not only they couldn't restore all the images, they even decided to remove all of free accounts AND their images. Looks a solid business plan to not trust imageshack anymore...
