Cloud computing took another hit over the weekend when major storms in the mid-Atlantic regions took down an Amazon data center in Virginia, and with it, Amazon cloud computing customers such as Netflix, Instagram and Pinterest. According to an article on Wired.com, the Amazon data center lost both its primary source and backup generator.

And while Amazon and its customers are supposed to plan for such problems, the Amazon service that distributes customers' loads among Amazon's data centers also failed, resulting in customers' sites going down. The problems over the weekend follow an extensive outage in Amazon's cloud services in April 2011.

A story in Sunday's New York Times notes Amazon's biggest customers apparently didn't experience of these issues, but says the latest Amazon problems will bring renewed questions about whether businesses should depend on cloud services.