Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram offline due to US power outage

Major internet services such as Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram suffered downtime on Friday night due to a power outage at Amazon’s EC2 cloud service. The outage was caused by a major storm in Virginia, USA.

Violent storms in northern Virginia caused a major power outage Friday night, leaving more than a million people without power. Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud service, among others, ran into problems and as a result, several large sites that are based with the cloud service went offline. Among the services were Netflix, Pinterest Heroku and Instagram. Some of the affected services were back online on Saturday morning, but not all. According to Instagram, “A severe thunderstorm in Virginia has hit most of our servers. Our team of engineers is currently working hard to restore service.”

Amazon was able to restore power to the affected data center soon after the outage, but problems continued for hours at a time with a “limited number of customers” according to Amazon. The service says on its status page it is investigating the problems. It is not the first time Amazon has encountered problems with its EC2 cloud service. It also went wrong earlier this month and in April and August of last year the service also suffered from significant downtime, writes Venture Beat.