Facebook and Amazon Are Too Big to Fail, and Pintrest, Netflix Are Suffering

The news that Instagram, and other sites such as Pinterest and Netflix, crashed after the Amazon EC2 cloud that hosts these and other services failed due to severe weather, left Instagrammers around the world sighting in dissapointment as another episode produced – albeit involuntarily – by another tech giant threatened with tainting their cool mobile artistic community.

Instagram, which was recently acquired by another tech giant – Facebook – for $1 billion was at the mercy of Amazon’s cloud service. Isn’t Facebook supposed to host or at least provide a more secure server for the company that it spent so much money in?

The episode highlights an unsettling trend in a tech sector that is becoming increasingly divided, with titans such as Facebook and Amazon – the tech equivalents of the “too big to fail” banks – on one side; and a string of innovative but smaller tech start ups (Instagram, Pinterest) that are trying to grow in a highly competitive tech sector on the other. 

Instagram woes started with the “Insta-Backlash” generated by the announcement that Facebook would by the young company for $1 billion, as the social network prepared for its IPO. This prompted Instagrammers to protest and threaten with cancelling their accounts as many of them were former Facebook users frustrated with privacy issues and invasive advertising. Furthermore, Facebook announceded soon after that it would launch its own photo-filtering standalone application -- Camera. 

Then, young Instagram a friendly and creative app was in risk of going down with the whole tech industry, when it seemed Facebook's volatile IPO would burst thech bubble 2.0. And now, that the social network seems to be in its road to recovery, Amazon cloud's failure interrupted Instagram's service upseting its 30 million users.