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Friday night revelers will just have to remember one night in its full, original color.
With a thunderstorm breaking across the mid-Atlantic region, Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud was knocked off line on Friday, taking with it popular web services and applications such as Instagram, Netflix and Pinterest. And all used Twitter to communicate the issues.
“We’re currently experiencing technical difficulties and we’re working to correct the issues. Thanks for your patience,” Instagram wrote to its over five million followers late Friday; by Saturday morning, with its service still down, it added a few details, writing, “Due to severe electrical storms, our host had a power outage, no data is lost – we’ve been working through the night to restore service.”
Pinterest suffered a shorter outage, with just about an hour in between its fall and relaunch. Presumably, millions of users added “speedy tech support” to their pinboard.
As for Netflix, it also suffered a loss in service, about three hours in total. By morning, users were able to once again live stream their favorite Saturday morning cartoons.
The storm left 2.5 million people without power in Virginia.
