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  (Photo: Reuters / Alexander Demianchuk)
  People relax at a beach near the Peter and Pawel Fortress, with the temperature at about 28 degrees Celsius (82.4 degrees Fahrenheit), in St. Petersburg July 14, 2011.

Instagram was shut down on Saturday morning in addition to other social networking sites after a fierce storm the night before wreaked havoc over the East Coast.

Violent storms in Virginia caused a widespread power outage across the area leaving over 4 million affected. The mass outages combined with extreme temperatures have left many in a dire state.

At least eight states were impacted by the storms in addition to a number of social networking websites that failed to function on Saturday morning. Storms in Northern Virginia knocked out Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, leaving many Internet users without some of the most popular Internet applications. Netflix, Pinterest, SocialFlow, and Instagram were all impacted.

Many users oblivious to the storms took to Twitter questioning why Instagram was out of service.

"My Instagram is still not working. Is Your Instagram working?"Dr. Karkar asked.

While programmers continued to work on the problem, services appeared inconsistent flickering on and back off again without warning.

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For some, Instagram has become such a popular social networking device that many joked about what to do without it.

"My instagram is down? What am I supposed to do with my food now? Eat it?" Gerard Smith posted of another Twitter user.

The incident however, was no joke for resident in those states who were affected by the storm. Power outages were experienced from New Jersey to Indiana and all the way south to Virginia.

Over 10 deaths have been attributed to the storm according to the Washington Post, six in Virginia; two in New Jersey; one in Ohio; and another in Maryland. The power outages come at an inconvenient time when temperatures have reached record highs. In much the mid-Atlantic regions temperatures were over 100 degrees.

No notifications have been posted as to when Instagram and other social networking sites would be back up.