Netflix, Instagram, Pinterest, BBM go down, thumbs go idle

Thunderstorms battering the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic regions of the US knocked out a host of web services this weekend, as well as leaving 3.5 million people without power.

Netflix, Instagram, Pinterest, and Amazon Cloud all went down Friday night, The Register reports. More than 900,000 homes suffered power outages on Saturday.

All of the above services rely on web storage from Amazon, so they were all decimated when storms took out the US-East-1 data centre in Northern Virginia, operated by Amazon Web Services.

Dominion Virginia Power, which provides power for the state, sent out a statement detailing the effects. The storms, worsened by the intense heat, involved winds in excess of 80mph, with lightning strikes, and falling trees taking out power lines.

Amazon confirmed to the Associated Press it had suffered damage to its operations as a result of the storms. The services are now back up and running.

Seemingly not wanting to go a day without something going wrong, RIM also suffered some issues with its BBM messaging service. You know, the one that went down last year. Though everything should now be back to normal.

RIM said in a statement: "Today, we experienced a service issue which may have affected some of our customers in certain parts of Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Some minor issues relating to browsing and BlackBerry Messenger may still persist, but all other services are operating as normal. We apologise to any customers in these regions who may have been inconvenienced."

With more storage going to the cloud, and with freak weather seemingly more common than ever, it is concerning that services can be affected this easily. In this instance it was mostly entertainment services that suffered, but as soon as your life is online, getting cut off is like being plunged into a new dark age.

Did you suffer any issues with services? Let me know in the comments, or on our Facebook page.