Storm Blamed for Instagram, Netflix, and Foursquare Outages

Image credit: AP Photo/Mel Evans

Over the weekend you might've had some trouble uploading a photo to Instagram, checking in on Foursquare, watching a movie on Netflix, pinning something to your Pinterest board, or posting to Reddit.

You also might have heard about the power outages across the country.

Amazon's Web Services, which powers many sites and Cloud services, was taken out by the lighting storms. Amazon's main server facility in Northern Virginia was hit hard by the storm, which left over 3 million people on the East Coast without power. (Check out our guide to the Cloud here.)

The outages started around 9 p.m. ET on Friday evening and lasted close to 12 hours for some of the services. Instagram and Netflix informed users via Twitter, however, many still were looking for answers. Instagram became one of the highest searched terms on Google on Saturday. Most services were up and running by Saturday afternoon.

This is the second time Amazon's Web Services went down this month and comes as Google announced just week its Cloud Compute Engine solution for companies.