The violent storm that hit the Eastern US left 13 dead, knocked out power for millions and hindered operations for several websites. In fact, the violent US storm caused server outages at Amazon, Netflix, Instagram and Pinterest.

Although the server outages were fixed within several hours, it’s safe to say most users of the websites affected thanked the gods for Facebook and Twitter. While Amazon, Netflix, Instagram and Pinterest tried to get their servers back online, they kept their subscribers informed on Facebook and Twitter.

Instagram’s Twitter feed read Saturday morning: “Due to severe electrical storms, our host had a power outage, no data is lost – we’ve been working through the night to restore service”. Netflix had a similar announcement for its users. It also recommended users to reconnect if they were still having a hard time with the video streaming service.

Users were hit hard by the server outages at Instagram, Netflix and Pinterest. One Twitter user wrote: “Now that pinterest, instagram and Netflix are down, I think I’m just going to spend the weekend learning the names of my children”.

Saturday’s server outage at Amazon isn’t the first problem of this kind to hit it lately. In fact, Amazon’s data center was hit by a power outage last month and a second similar problem could damage users’ confidence in the reliability of the cloud computing platform. In fact, based on the Twitter posts from Netflix Director of Cloud Architecture Adrian Cockroft and Rick Branson, engineer at Instagram, the Amazon problem was behind their own outages.

Amazon spokeswoman Kay Kinton tried to explain their server outage was caused by severe thunderstorms that affected the “primary and backup generator power to an Availability Zone in our east region overnight”.  The Associated Press reports that Kinton said Saturday morning Amazon “restored service to most of our impacted customers and continue to work and restore service for our remaining impacted customers”.

The severe storms that ravaged servers at Amazon, Instagram, Netflix and Pinterest left some three million people without power in Eastern United States. The Associated Press writes the damage caused was similar to that of a hurricane as authorities say it will take days to repair the power outage.