Are you sure it was Pbase and not Fotki? I don't think Pbase has been around too long like Fotki has. One of the reasons I went to Pbase was because Fotki was so unreliable.
Of course I'm old and half senile, so don't go too much by me.. ;)
When Pbase first came out or was discovered, it had some mild server 'oops' that did weird stuff to the images.
Fotki is the more notorious one as you remember.
That one didn't just disallow you from seeing images, IIRC, it once erased a whole bunch of images.
I seem to remember when Pbase's server did something odd you asked us, "Isn't this why I quit using Fotki?"