It wasn't too long ago that a freak storm in Virginia took down Amazon's cloud servers, and along with it, Instagram, Pinterest and other popular websites.

The outages, which came amid a brutal heat wave, left thousands without power and thousands more irritated at the absence of some much-beloved web services. But was the event a one-time thing or a harbinger of worse Internet catastrophes to come?

Our friends at Slashdot.org prepared the infographic below to look into the question of just how vulnerable the web is to freak weather events. The answer? More so than you might think.

Amazon and Rackspace both have major cloud computing centers in Virginia, which experienced three hurricanes from 2003 to 2004 alone. Add in climate scientists' predictions that global warming will increase the frequency and severity of these types of storms, and there's an argument for redundancy in your cloud network if we ever heard one.

Thumbnail courtesy NASA, Flickr.