Breakfasts everywhere went undocumented on social media Saturday morning because photo-sharing site Instagram is still down after a line of powerful storms caused mass power outages across the Midwest and Atlantic Seaboard on Friday night.
Fierce thunderstorms and high winds, some topping 80 miles per hour, whipped across Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Washington and Virginia, leaving debris, hot temperatures and no power to combat the record-breaking heat.
In addition to Instagram, Mashable and Forbes reported that on Friday night Netflix and Pinterest, powered by Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, also were down because of weather affecting the region. The majority of those accounts, and the sites themselves, appear to be up and running again.
However, on Saturday morning, people were still taking to Twitter and Facebook, complaining or poking fun at the impact of Instagram, based in northern Virginia, going dark.
Some tweets encouraged people to enjoy the blackout by leaving technology behind for the weekend, that it's OK to eat breakfast and drink coffee without sharing a photo of it with the rest of the world via social media. Other tweets joked that many people would go undocumented on Facebook or Twitter as long as Instagram was down because of the site's various photo-enhancing filters.
A similar conversation ensued when Twitter experienced a widespread outage on June 21, its largest since October 2011.
More on social media:
When losing e-mail is like a snow day
Instagram: My addiction and affliction
Viral vigilantism, Tony Hawk style
Instagram and the rise of photo apps
Instagram wants photos to be seen beyond 10-hour window
Do you fly into a panic when your favorite social media site goes temporarily dark? Or does it allow you to disconnect? Let us know in the comments below.
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I wish upon Facebook having the same demise.
Amen
You and me both, Greek American!
It there is a great flying spaghetti monster in the sky, it will.
Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Washington and Virginia. Midwest huh?
Yep. Indiana, Ohio are Midwest. DC and Virginia are considered the Atlantic Seaboard. Learn yo geography.
Poor reporting : data centers have generators designed to cope with utility power failures. They don't go dark just because the power goes out. So what happened here? There's an interesting story to be told as to why the backup power measures failed.
Even if the data center itself stayed up but all communication relays for hundreds of miles around went down, the service would be unreachable.
So you're telling me that a multi-billion dollar company like Facebook doesn't have a backup system in place to deal with such issues? I find that impossible to believe.
I am glad I took my Facebook page down.
You call this joke funny..
I honestly don't recall asking your opinion on this. It matters not what you think.
Yeah I HATE when that happens (eyeroll)
Lol i call all bobcats jokes *funnies!* Good one bobcat.
And I'm supposed to care because......?
Hi chrissy
No its not a joke, its called a little mister. Oops same thing.
K.
I got highjacked 3 times on here.
Hello little mister.
lmao now THATS funny! Who hijacks a hijacker? Lol