Photo Sharing Service Instragram Outage Angers SoFla Users
MIAMI (CBSMiami) - If you run a service with "Insta" in the name, it's never good to be out of service. After hours of error messages, the photo-sharing service Instagram was restored for most users Saturday.
The social media site went down after strong storms knocked out power to much of the east coast Friday night and Saturday morning.
Before service was restored, thousands of users took to their other social media accounts to voice their frustrations over the Instagram outage.
"I see it on Facebook. Everyone's putting 'oh my god my Instagram'," Estefania Orrego said.
Orrego is one of the more than 30 million Instagram users affected by the service interruption.
"Last night and this morning. I can't use it yet," Orrego said as she scrolled through her iPhone outside Dolphin Mall in Miami Saturday.
"It's been down, up and down, all day," Brett Powell said.
Powell was annoyed he couldn't edit and upload his favorite images.
"Everyone keeps saying they can't refresh their feed. I can't touch any photos up," Powell explained.
Twitter blew up with Instagram complaints in the wake of the outage.
Saturday afternoon, the phrase "My Instagram" was a trending topic in Miami.
A tweet from Instagram's account says "Due to sever electrical storms, our host had a power outage, no data is lost – We've been working through the night to restore service.
Some users, like Powell, don't accept that explanation.
"You get bought out by Facebook for a billion, and you're telling me you don't have a disaster recovery plan set in place. I don't buy it."
Netflix and Pinterest also suffered outages because of the storms.
They, along with Instagram, are customers of Amazon Inc.'s web services division.
Amazon spokeswoman Kay Kinton told The Associated Press in an email that the storm cut power to some of company's operations. She added service has already been restored to most customers.
Pinterest, an online scrapbook service, says employees are still working on any lingering kinks.
Netflix, a video streaming service, tweeted that subscribers should reconnect if they still experienced problems.
