Power outage impacts Photobucket over key holiday period
Pioneering photo sharing and storage site Photobucket is still struggling to return to full service after a power outage affected the company around Christmas. The site, which came under new management in June of 2018, has changed its fee structure away from advertising to a paid-storage model. On Dec. 18, Photobucket reported a power outage at its primary data center, advising customers: “Due to the abrupt nature of the outage the equipment that runs the site shut down unexpectedly. The immediate shutdown resulted in systematic issues when the power was restored. Unfortunately, due to this unexpected shutdown, we were also not able to rely on our backup data center resources.”
As of Dec. 24, the company posted on it’s Facebook page:
“Our systems are running through continuous verification processes as they come back online. Unfortunately, this is taking longer than we would like, but we want to confirm everything is cross checked, secure and verified. We do not have a firm completion date, but we are hoping this will be resolved soon. We will report back as progress continues. We apologize for the recent service disruption that you have been experiencing these last few days.”
Uptime monitoring sites like eCommerceBytes and DownDetector, as well as numerous posts to the Photobucket Facebook page, indicate users are still having trouble logging in, seeing their photos and in downloading images.
Emails sent to Photobucket for comment have not yet been responded to.
I’ve been a subscribing member for years. My Photobucket account still remains down weeks after the outage. Most of my website is filled with broken embed links. I contacted Photobucket asking for some form of credit, seeing that they just billed me for my annual subscription. I used the word “credit,” which they in turn took to mean “cancel.” They cancelled my account without my permission, and now I’ve seemingly lost thousands of images and years of work had my account been fully restored.
Prior to this outage, Photobucket’s services have been frustrating. Their servers go down frequently, and this past spring, they changed the structure of their embed links without notifying customers of the changes and taking into account the impact it would have on preexisting images used on websites or using them going forward. I was also put into contact with their VP of Product who at least gave me 50% off toward my next subscription, but seeing that my account has been down a month and they just cancelled it on me for requesting further credit, it never made up for it.
I have never had such a poor experience with any brand in my entire life. What’s even worse is that there are many, many other people on social media complaining about not receiving any help from Photobucket customer support. I don’t think they care. They’re billing everyone annually, yet not providing a service or showing any action toward making this right with longtime loyal customers.
This is the kind of thing it’s going to be very hard for Photobucket to recover from. – GP