Yes it's because of Photobucket.
They switched to paid only years ago. At which point they held your images hostage and started putting water marks over them and making the page crash when you tried to dump your images.
At which point in around 2017 someone made an app that cost a dollar that bypasses their crash and dumped out the images. I did this and archived all of mine.
I then switched to Imgur, who are slowly starting to go the same way. IE if you use an ad blocker they break the size editing tools so I now do them all manually in Photoshop.
Anything on Photobucket will now be gone, and I'm pretty confident their tactics didn't work. Simply as no one is using it now.