After rival site SmugMug acquired Flickr from Yahoo, some big changes came to the service. One of them that impacted free users is a new membership model. Users had to pay $50 for Pro membership or they would be limited to 1,000 images per account. Those who opted to keep their free accounts would have the images over 1,000 be deleted (starting with the older photos). Flickr initially gave a deadline of February 5th. But the company just announced it is extending the deadline to March 12th.
If you took advantage of the 1TB free storage, that meant a lot of photos. Users complained about the roadblocks they faced trying to download their archives—including only being able to download 500 images at a time as well as slow download speeds.
Source: The Verge