Photo site Flickr to go down for six hours

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer speaks during a May 2013 announcement related to its Flickr photo-sharing site.

Flickr, the Yahoo-owned photo site, will be down for six hours Thursday evening for maintenance.

The outage, which the company announced Wednesday in a blog post, is expected to last from 7 p.m. to 1 a.m. ET.

"During this time, Flickr will be unavailable on web and mobile, and the API (the interface used by developers) will not be reachable," the post reads. "There will also be a site-wide notice an hour beforehand to make sure no one is taken by surprise.":

Flickr users were encouraged to follow the site's Twitter feed for updates during the outage. Yahoo did not offer any details on what kind of maintenance is planned for the site.

Six hours is an unusually long down time for a major site like Flickr, which claims about 87 million users.

Revamping Flickr has been one of Yahoo's goals since CEO Marissa Mayer took over the company last year.

In May, Yahoo rolled out a complete overhaul of Flickr, which included a design update focused on larger images, new social features and a whole terabyte of storage for each user -- enough to store an estimated 537,000 photos.

The redesign came after users campaigned for the newly hired Mayer to "make Flickr awesome again." She and others at Yahoo acknowledged that the site had become neglected since Yahoo bought it in 2005.

source cnn.