In case you didn't hear, some of Facebook's hard drives went kaput, potentially taking down at least some of some users' photo collections temporarily.
According to an update on Facebook's official blog, the site suffered a "rare" simultaneous hard drive failure, affecting 10-15% of uploaded photos.
Here's how they explained it:
"During an otherwise routine software upgrade on Friday night, we ran into some problems with our photo storage and a few of the hard drives where we store photos apparently failed all at once. We're trying to fully understand what happened, since simultaneous hardware failures like this are rare."
As you'd hope, everything is backed up.
But it appears getting things back online wasn't a simple process.
"We still have all your photos because we store them in a way that maintains multiple copies of the data in case of hardware failures like this. However, even though your photos are safe, we can't serve photos off the affected storage volumes until they're repaired. We're working on them right now, but it will take some time because there's so much data on them and the repair process largely involves copying huge amounts of data to new drives. This is why some photos aren't showing up right now".
We're not going to criticise Facebook for something like this - hard drive failures happen to the best of us. Still, it makes us wonder whether we're trusting too much important, or in the case of party photos (not so important) information to the Internet "cloud".
As was proven recently when Gmail went down, free Web services can and do crash. Lets hope you have contingencies for when they do.