For those of you who woke up to a flurry of frustrated customers or shocked that your website images were not displaying...Some shared hosting companies including Hostmonster and Bluehost have disabled symlinks (symbolic links) used by Drupal and other content management systems to display images. Hosting companies choosing to disallow symbolic links have changed the .htaccess file, which ultimately breaks your linking structures.

From what I've read, Hostmonster feels symbolic links are a security threat to their servers. And while I understand that may or may not be true, it would have been nice to receive a notification that this change was taking place so people could have been prepared.

Drupal.org has released a thread regarding the change, as well as a solution to fix the symlink issue. Dustin Currie, a developer at LevelTen expects modifications to the root htaccess file in Drupal core to fix this issue. So for you those willing to update Drupal, keep your eye on Drupal 6.16+.

Again, the Drupal thread and solution can be found here. I hope this information is helpful.