Netflix, Instagram And Pinterest Go Down: Outages Caused By Virginia Storm

NEW YORK — Netflix, Instagram and Pinterest are using Twitter and Facebook to update subscribers after violent storms across the eastern U.S. caused server outages for hours.

Netflix and Pinterest restored service by Saturday afternoon.

Instagram used its Facebook fan page to communicate with users of its photo-sharing service. It posted a message on Saturday morning that blamed the electrical storm for the outage and explained that its engineers were working to restore service.

Still, many Instagram's users were searching for answers. "Instagram" was the top search term on Google on Saturday, according to Google Trends.

Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram are customers of Amazon Inc.'s web services division. The unit provides web services and data storage facilities that are commonly used for "cloud computing".

Amazon spokeswoman Kay Kinton told The Associated Press in an email that the storm cut power to some of company's operations. Service has been restored for most customers, Kinton said.

Netflix, a video streaming service, said on Twitter that subscribers should reconnect if they still experienced problems.

The online scrapbook service Pinterest says employees are working to fix remaining issues that may affect performance.

The Friday evening storms knocked out power for millions of people.

Comments

[Neal Washburn]

06:47 PM on 07/02/2012

This is sort of of the "Butterfly Effect" as applied to Cloud Computing.

[deadman449]

02:09 PM on 07/02/2012

How do you not have emergency generators? Every 24 hour and mission critical systems should have UPS and emergency generators.

[Sal George]

01:55 PM on 07/02/2012

My god, the humanity. People must be just destroyed.

[edenooch]

11:29 AM on 07/02/2012

wow. for a little while... you people had your life back

[MikeinHanover]

06:15 AM on 07/02/2012

No failover. No UPS. I wonder what the SLA says about restoration and penalities.

[The 4th Degree]

08:36 PM on 07/01/2012

2 I know. What's Instagram?

[scoobydubious]

03:37 PM on 07/01/2012

"Netflix, Instagram And Pinterest Go Down"

...and it makes zero difference in my life whatsoever. If i hadn't read the headline I never would have known.

[frankerin]

03:36 PM on 07/01/2012

When are these clowns going to recognize the need for mirror servers outside of their regions and even then duplicated is at least two other regrions. Weather and other natural forces seem to be gathering strength as compared with hstoriic norms, and levels of security need to be be heightened to face higher or more potent assaults. This years 100 year flood may be next years 1000 year flood, and that the first of many. Sea levels on the east coast are rising surprisingly. Tthe rate of increase is increasing so that in a decade major cities will see not floods but standing sea encroachments. These will be aggrievated by tides and storms. Let's spend the next ten years either ignoring or yammering about what to do instead of doing physical things to keep nature at bay.

[Alexis Elizabeth Drob]

02:26 PM on 07/01/2012

I love my "Pinterest"!!!!!

[kame2comm]

12:38 PM on 07/01/2012

oh really i never noticed who cares net flix or any of the others could go down no problem I'll just go walk the dog

[Alexis Elizabeth Drob]

02:26 PM on 07/01/2012

And spend the rest of the day playing with yourself!!!

[scoobydubious]

03:38 PM on 07/01/2012

So if YOU don't have "Netflix, Instagram And Pinterest" then that is the only other thing you can think to do with yourself?

Sad.

[SidTheScienceKid]

03:46 PM on 07/01/2012

ditto ! And I don't have a dog! :)

[Sanders McGrillin]

11:16 AM on 07/01/2012

Uh oh!
Don't say "global warming"
someone may call you al gore if you blame it on that "climate change"

[Charles the Great]

12:49 PM on 07/01/2012

The problem is these kind of storms have nothing to due with it anyway

[frankerin]

03:36 PM on 07/01/2012

Are you serious or just dumb

[Alexis Elizabeth Drob]

02:27 PM on 07/01/2012

Laugh now, we will see if you are still laughing when mother nature comes knocking down YOUR door!!!

[heymack]

11:04 AM on 07/01/2012

I have an outsourced server farm for a bunch of websites I run in Northern Virginia...data center is in Herndon in the old Server Beach which is not part of Pier 1 networks.  I had no down time at all.  These centers have redundant connections to the power grid and huge diesel powered generates the size of buildings in the back.  I know where the Amazon folks are, I was at that building last year and it doesn't make sense what happened.  Something else is going on here and my guess is that it was with one or more of the major backbone providers.

[frankerin]

03:40 PM on 07/01/2012

Maybe, I don't know, but I do object that multiple server mirrors are not situated randomly outside any region for redundantcy. If this is the cloud, it evaporated in this vicious storm, and there will be more. Physcal bottlenecks must be identified and circumvented. Even the electric grid is vultnerable and still not understood by the experts. One day this might happen and other problems come on top with no communication.

[userw014]

07:42 AM on 07/01/2012

It's hard to believe that Amazon Web Services (AWS) would let themselves (or their customers) be taken out by something like a power outage. I haven't checked the AWS service offerings, but I suppose they would offer their customers a lower tier of service that would be protected by redundancy at other data centers rather than by the reliability of a particular location. But it's hard to believe that Netflix, Pintrest, et. al. would put themselves at risk of hours of regional service outage too.

Those data-centers/server-farms are HUGE consumers of electricity. I would be surprised if they've provisioned for more than an hour's worth of full backup at each data-center (if that.) They probably have different tiers of service offering so they can keep some sites up for days, while others go down pretty rapidly.

On the other hand, what kind of service agreement do you expect from a "free" social networking site like Pintrest, or (for that matter) Netflix? I can hardly believe that anyone's lives are at risk - and the only careers at risk are probably at Netflix & Pinterst. (I really doubt that AWS will suffer anything more than embarrassment.)

[heymack]

11:06 AM on 07/01/2012

These data centers have redundant connections to the power grid and large diesel generators to back them up, I am shocked that this problem occurred.

[userw014]

07:45 PM on 07/01/2012

These data centers are using up so much power that the consume a significant fraction of a generating station for a public utility.
It would be very appealing to design a tiered system of service guarantees in the face of a power outage - and it would be very appealing for some company like Pintrest, et. al. to gamble that paying for the higher tier isn't worth the loss that might occur.

[tessabe]

04:06 AM on 07/01/2012

I wondered what happened. I wanted to finish watching a documentary and netflix was down.

[ipleathe5thh]

03:03 AM on 07/01/2012

We got hit hard here in Ohio too we have about a Million without power...We had a tree come down in our yard but we didn't loose power nor did we have any problems with Netflix. My wife watched Netflix all night and didn't have any problems