If you're an gorging Photobucket user, you woke upwardly to a nasty surprise this past week: the photograph storage and hosting service changed their terms, breaking billions of images online in one vicious dive, without so much as a courtesy discover.

Some explanation is probably in order.

Photobucket has been allowing free users to host and link to images on its servers since 2003. If you wanted to host your photos on Photobucket and display them on some 3rd party site (also known equally hotlinking) you could do that without being a paying member. This is an extremely useful—not to mention bandwidth-intensive—service to offer, and it'due south one of the reasons Photobucket has managed to amass over 10 billion photos uploaded to its servers by over 100 one thousand thousand users.

Simply starting last week, the visitor changed its terms and membership structure, and what once was free will now cost users a whopping $400 per twelvemonth. Suddenly, billions of images Photobucket users had hotlinked online no longer showed up. Entire forum threads, like this one establish the photo blog by PetaPixel, are now devoid of images.

Instead, you lot take this graphic on display... over and over:

As you can imagine, Photobucket users are non happy about the alter. Any fourth dimension a complimentary service turns into a paid one there'due south bound to be some griping, simply going from gratis to $400/year is an extreme bound by any standard.

On the one hand, it's easy to justify Photobucket's determination from a concern standpoint: ad revenues are dropping, and hosting that many images has to be incredibly expensive. Just doing it so all of a sudden, without so much every bit a courtesy warning, has users turning to social media to vent their frustration.

Some are calling information technology 'blackmail' and 'extortion,' others are saying it'southward business suicide, and droves of users are bidding an angry bye:

Whatever you want to call it, one thing is certain: making such a sweeping change without warning was the incorrect telephone call. You hear that noise? It's the stampede of users running pell mell towards Imgur.