Maybe these were the culprits? From Reuters:

“It is our understanding that Flickr users in China are not able to see images on Flickr, and we have confirmed that this is not a technical issue on our end,” a spokeswoman for Yahoo Hong Kong said in an e-mail in response to a Reuters inquiry.

“It appears that the Chinese government is restricting access to Flickr, although we have not received confirmation from them,” the spokeswoman said in the e-mail.

“We are currently investigating this issue and hope that it is only a temporary one,” she added.

This Firefox add-on has been working pretty well for us, although we never can get all the images on the Shanghaiist Contribute page to load (see attached screen cap). Weird.

Well, at least life is never boring here.

UPDATE: This is actually from four days ago, but ...

China's embassy in Washington wasn't aware of the problem, but said the problem could be the result of Chinese government attempts to "protect children from racy images," according to the newspaper.

There were racy images on Flickr? Now you tell us ...

Also on Shanghaiist
Having Flickr problems?