Wondering why that blue-filtered photo of your latte won't upload? It appears that a large, non-hurricane summer storm that swept through several mid-Atlantic states on Friday caused power outages in Virginia that affected big banks of servers belonging to Netflix, Pinterest, and Instagram. Netflix and Pinterest have come back online, but Instagram, not so much.
The storm caused over two million people to lose power and is being blamed for a dozen storm and heat-related deaths, including six in Virginia. The storm also affected New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Tennessee, West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky, but the worst damage has been reported in the D.C. suburbs of Maryland and Northern Virginia.
The storm is what the National Weather Service describes as “a derecho” a long string of severe thunderstorms that produce damaging winds, in some cases reaching 90 miles per hour as the derecho swept east from Ohio.
As for you Instagram users, engineers are working to get the app back up and running. We hope you are not too pained.
