There Goes The Weekend! Pinterest, Instagram And Netflix Down Due To AWS Outage [Updated]

Are you out at a Friday night dinner somewhere, trying to take a filtered picture of some fancypants dessert and post it to Instagram to no avail? Are you currently making futile efforts to pin said dessert to your “Fancy Dessert” board on Pinterest but failing?

Well you’re out of luck, digital hipsters! Because of storms in North Virginia, power outages have impaired Amazon Web Services data centers in the region tonight, which means no Pinterest, Instagram, Netflix, Heroku and other sundry AWS-dependent services for you.

According to the AWS outage dashboard the company is ONIT, yet, as of 12:31AM PST, it is only at 50% recovery.

This service outage inevitably begs the question: If someone takes an iPhone pic of a Friday night artisanal beer, and it’s not posted on Instagram, does it make a sound?

As one HackerNews commentator put it, “No matter how powerful we become as a species with our technology, we are still at the mercy of the clouds. Pretty cool if you think about it.” Too true.

‘Night guys.

Also: It’s also worth pointing out that these outages seem to affect services in other markets like Europe — meaning that, despite Amazon having more local hubs in Europe, Asia Pacific and South America, these services appear to be routed through only one of them, in North America. We’ll keep checking and updating the blog with any more news.

Update: As of 9.34AM GMT today (1.34AM Pacific), selected services running through Amazon’s North Virginia servers are back up. Instagram still appears to be down, though.

Update 2: At about 12:45 PM PST it looks as though Crunchbase, Instagram and others are slowly regaining their full-functionality. Quick, somebody find me a coffee with some sweet foam art!



