Hello everyone,

Last Thursday, a change went live affecting the page images API, which cased images that previously were appearing in many Wikimedia projects including the Wikipedia apps, the Wikimedia portal and mobile web search results to disappear for about 3 hours. The full incident report can be found here https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incident_documentation/20161202-20161201-PageImages, the original bug report, here https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T152155.

This issue was temporarily fixed by allowing projects to display both free and non-free images by default for the short term. This will be reverted once a maintenance script creating the new list of images completes running, which should take a couple of weeks. After this, the default will change back to displaying free images only. We will send an update again once this is deployed.

Thanks and sorry for the inconvenience and chaos!

- Olga