Most websites have back-up or "restore" functions to help recover lost information, however, not too sure Photobucket does. Recently, an online hacker group of a bunch of showoffs (imo, they are Turkish anti-American) hacked the image hosting site of Photobucket, I'd say this is 'up-there' on their score list, considering in the past they've hacked people's person blogs....
I seriously doubt Photobucket.com will be back again anytime soon. I may be wrong, but, like I said this is a big deal to them even if we can just use imageshack.
Don't go googling NetDevilz, their obviously pretty low people that won't hesitate to make themselves a threat to any individual's computer. I'd also advise you to shut down any P2P operations you may be running if you had a photobucket.com account, or even if you receive updates from the Avast anti-virus program.

hm, my friend's account there is ok and works fine
a few others' and mine are down, maybe permanently
I had my photobucket account viewable to all guests and he had his private with a required password

My account is fine...

So is mine, now
but considerable amount of people had this problem. Like I said, some were not effected what-so-ever and some couldn't even see the Photobucket pictures even if you could see them yourself. That's why it was strange, to me