Instagram, Netflix, Pinterest taken offline by severe storms in US

Published Jun 30 2012, 18:32 BST  |  By Paul Martinovic

Instagram, Netflix and Pinterest have all been taken offline for periods in the last 24 hours (June 30) due to a heat wave and thunderstorms affecting cloud computing services in the US.

The Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud, a service that runs many major websites including Instagram, is based over North Virginia, where there were severe weather conditions last night.















VentureBeat reports that heavy thunderstorms, powerful winds and torrential rains resulted in widespread power outages in the area, and at around 11.21pm EDT (4.21am BST) on June 29, Amazon Web Services reported: "We are investigating connectivity issues for a number of instances in the US-EAST-1 Region."

Netflix, Instagram and Pinterest subsequently tweeted that they were working on fixes for the outage shortly afterwards.

Services for Pinterest and Netflix were almost back to normal within 90 minutes, whereas Instagram remained down well into the next morning. Instagram appears to still have not returned to full functionality as of the time of writing, with users still experiencing problems with the service as of 6.30pm BST (1.30pm EDT).

This is the second time in two weeks that the Amazon Cloud has failed, with a six and a half hour outage last week. The failure has led to many to speculate whether the companies will choose alternative services, or even abandon cloud computing altogether.