Instagram, Pinterest Users Shut Out: Electrical Storms Knock Out Popular Sites

Instagram users were out of luck for large chunks of Saturday as severe heat and violent storms across the the eastern U.S. caused sever outages that had the site down for hours. Pinterest and Netflix had similar outages, leaving the sites to update subscribers using Twitter and Facebook.

The site outages left many users searching for answers Saturday, with “Instagram” the top search term on Google, the Associated Press reported. Instagram took to its Facebook page to tell users that the site was taken down by electrical storms, and after hours of work service for the sites were mostly restored by the afternoon.

Netflix, Instagram and Pinterest are all customers of Amazon Inc.’s web services division, which provides data storage facilities used for “cloud computing,” the Associated Press reported. Amazon officials said some of its services were down during electrical storms that knocked out power for more than three million people.

Tech savvy users could already figure out the problem through Amazon’s server status page, but the site outages sent ripples of panic throughout the internet, the Los Angeles Times reported.

“Netflix down, Pinterest down, Instagram down,” Twitter user @lexibridges wrote. “People, if this isn’t the sign of the apocalypse I don’t know what is.”

Pinterest and Netflix were the first sites back up as engineers worked to fix the problems. Instagram, the site that allows users to take photos, apply filters and share the pics with friends, took a bit longer, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Its users were particularly flummoxed with the problem.

“My Instagram is down?” wrote Twitter user @YourFavWhiteMan. “What am I supposed to with my food, eat it?”