Netflix, Pinterest, and Instagram users all took a hit over the weekend as storms on the east coast battered a cloud storage center in Virginia. Lightning strikes in Springfield, Va., hit a building that houses Amazon’s Web Services, which stores data for all sorts of companies, including these high-profile sites.
The interruption underlined how businesses and consumers are increasingly exposed to unforeseen risks and wrenching disruptions as they increasingly embrace life in the cloud. It was also a big blow to what is probably the fastest-growing part of the media business, start-ups on the social Web that attract millions of users seemingly overnight.
Most affected Netflix and Pinterest customers had access to movies and pinnings a couple hours after the Friday night outage, while Instagrammers had to wait a little later into Saturday morning to document the aftermath in photo filters.
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