Were you out on a Friday night dinner somewhere in the U.S. , adding filters to the food you ordered and post it to Instagram to no avail? You may have even tried to make futile efforts to pin the picture of the delicacy to your Food board on Pinterest but failed?
Those that were not out on a Friday night due to bad weather and found a good excuse to stay home and watch a movie on Netflix were also disappointed.
The Reason for this and by now most of you know was because quick-moving thunderstorms hit several states in the U.S. from Indiana to New Jersey sparking widespread power outages for over four million people. The outages largely centered around Washington, D.C., which has faced its worst heat wave since 1934, with a temperature of 104.
The storm, which swept through Virginia and Maryland during a harrowing two-hour stretch, uprooted trees across the region, closed roads and damaged homes.
But the storm's impact was also felt around the Web in a big way knocking out a slew of social media sites like Instagram, Pinterest, Netflix, Heroku, SocialFlow that run on Amazon Web Services data centers on Friday and Saturday.
Amazon Web Services, which powers these sites and many other Startups was impacted during the widespread power outages that affected the region.
Initial reports of the outages began to filter through at around 9pm PT on Friday.
Video streaming site Netflix, photo site Instagram and virtual scrapbook site Pinterest took to other forms of social media, using sites like Twitter and Facebook to explain the situation to users.
“As of Friday evening of June 29, 2012, Instagram has been experiencing technical difficulties,” reads a recent Instagram Facebook post. “An electrical storm in Virginia has affected most of our servers, and our team of engineers is working hard to restore service.”
Netflix took to Twitter to apologize to users. “We’re sorry for the outage and working to get your Friday streaming back to normal as quickly as possible. Thank you for bearing with us,” Netflix tweeted, and added, ”Everyone should be back up shortly, if you aren’t already. Thanks again for being patient. And awesome.”
“If you still can’t connect this morning, find your device here: http://bit.ly/LHNOhB , then remove and reinstall the app. #dcstorm,” tweeted Netflix Saturday.
Netflix and Pinterest were up and running Saturday. Pinterest indicating that things may be beginning to return to normal, tweeting, “We’re back! Our team is continuing to work on some remaining issues that may impact performance. Thanks for your patience and happy pinning!”
While Some Instagram users were still experiencing lags as the popular photo-sharing service scrambled to restore problems till Sunday.
"Instagram" was the top search term on Google on Saturday, according to Google Trends.
Instagram launched in 2010 and allows iPhone and Android users to edit photos with retro-looking filters with names like “Rise”, “Valencia” and “Toaster.” Instagram made headlines this year after Facebook bought the application, which is free, for $1 billion.
By midday Saturday, Amazon said in a statement that it had restored service “to most of our impacted customers, and continue to work to restore service to our remaining impacted customers.” “We will share more details on this event in the coming days.” The company added.
The power outage is expected to last for a few days.
The failure also comes coincidentally days after Google announced its intention to get into the cloud computing services space.
