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For a few hours over the weekend, thousands of vintage-looking photos went unshared, online movies went unstreamed, and digital scrapbooks went unpinned.

An electrical storm that swept across the East Coast late Friday knocked out power at a Virginia data center run by Amazon Web Services. The outage disrupted numerous web companies that rely on Amazon's virtual data servers, including Instagram, Netflix and Pinterest.

Amazon said a "power outage caused storage failures for customers who rent space on Amazons servers through its cloud service. It said it had restored service to the remainder of its customers on Saturday.

"While no amount of downtime is acceptable, in the six years of running these services our customers have been quite pleased with our operational performance," Amazon spokeswoman Tera Randle said in a statement.

Analysts said the outage highlighted the tradeoffs of cloud computing, an increasingly popular method of outsourcing computing power and storage to remote servers over the web. A growing number of companies and government agencies are taking advantage of cloud computing largely because it is cheaper -- they only pay for the computing power they need. It also allows them to quickly respond to spikes in traffic by expanding their server capacity.

But the cloud is not always dependable. In April 2011, Amazons cloud service was brought down by a technical glitch, disrupting several major websites, including Foursquare, Reddit and HootSuite.

Experts say failures at data centers are not unusual. But a failure of Amazon's cloud service can have widespread impacts across the web because the company has thousands of customers.

An outage at a data center happens every day, but you never hear about them because there are only one or two companies involved, said George Reese, chief technology officer for enStratus, which helps companies manage their data in the cloud. But when the cloud goes down, so many companies are impacted it makes big news.

Amazon allows companies, for an extra fee, to spread their data across eight regional data centers around the world. This "insulates companies against occasional failure" at a single data center, an Amazon spokeswoman said.

Yet most companies, particularly smaller startups, don't back up their virtual infrastructure in multiple places, said Lydia Leong, an analyst who covers cloud computing for Gartner Research.

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Amazon Power Outage Exposes Risks Of Cloud Computing