In the week that the International Working Group on Cloud Computing Resiliency reported worldwide cloud outages cost at least £45m over five years, the all-encompassing Amazon EC2 Cloud was down on Friday night due to heavy storms in Virginia.

From approximately 2300 EST on Friday users were unable to access various sites utilising the Amazon infrastructure cloud, including Pinterest, Netflix and Instagram.

It’s certainly more proof that real clouds can have an effect on cloud computing. This particular storm was deadly, with the death toll as high as 17 across eastern America.

Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) status board is a healthy sea of green as of Monday morning, but July 30 and 31 was a different story in the North America region with the EC2, Relational Database Service (RDS) and Elastic Beanstalk clouds in Virginia affected across both days.

A statement from AWS at 2321 EST on Friday said …