A massive thunderstorm near the nation's capital Friday night knocked Netflix, Instagram and Pinterest offline for a few hours.

The three companies suffered major interruptions to their Web services to people everywhere after the huge storm knocked the power from an Amazon data center that the sites rely on. The companies took to social networks to tell their users what was happening.

The problems reportedly lasted six hours. All three services were working by Saturday afternoon.

Amazon said the storm caused its data center to lose power, according to the Associated Press.

"Severe thunderstorms caused us to lose primary and backup generator power to an Availability Zone in our east region overnight,” an Amazon spokeswoman said, according to Wired. “We have restored service to most of our impacted customers and continue to work to restore service for our remaining impacted customers.”

The storm caused power outages in and around the Washington, D.C., area, knocking out...

The big star of the Google I/O conference was the Nexus 7 tablet announced at the keynote speech Wednesday, and one of them arrived at our office Friday.

At first glance, the Nexus 7's box looks surprisingly small for a tablet and more like an oversized container for a smartphone. But when you take off the cover, you find the 7-inch-screen tablet takes up the entirety of the box and actually looks like a pretty good-size device.

The tablet, which is the first device to run Android Jelly Bean, takes a minute or two to get past the initial setup, but not too long after first being turned on, it's good to go.

Google sent us an 8-GB version of the device, available to pre-order from Google Play for $199. The 16-GB Nexus 7 is also available for pre-order: $249 from Google Play or $249.99 from GameStop. They should ship next month.

After you get past setup, you first see a "My Library" widget with content that Google has pre-loaded onto the tablet. You get a couple of books, magazines and, the...

Well, Shutterfly faces that challenge Monday -- but on an exponentially more massive scale.

Massive, as in 5 billion images -- or 10 years' worth of Kodak customers' memories. Shutterfly is transferring the photo files from Kodak Gallery, which is closing down as of July 2.

In place of the single-terabyte hard drives we might use for our personal photo collections, "Think of a room filled with 10,000 hard drives," said Jeffrey Weber, Shutterfly’s chief information officer. A room packed tightly from floor to ceiling, with heavy-duty 90-terabyte hard drives, that is.

Redwood City, Calif.-based Shutterfly acquiredonline gallery assets of bankrupt Eastman Kodak at the end of April for $23.8 million,...

It's worth keeping a close eye on trendingYouTube videos. The video sharing site has become our culture's highlight reel and dumping ground.

You've heard the insane numbers: Seventy-two hours of YouTube are uploaded every minute. More than 3 billion hours of YouTube video are watched every month. And last year, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views -- about 140 views for every person on Earth.

That's a lot of video.

So how can you sort through it all and find the best that YouTube has to offer?

Allow us to help. Each week we'll reach out to YouTube Trends manager Kevin Allocca, the guy whose job it is to make sense of what is hitting and why.

He'll help us find three awesome, intriguing, weird trending videos, and we'll share them with you.

Sound like a deal?

This week we look at incredible domino art, why you should consider spiral-cutting your hot dog, and the latest parody of Gotye's "Someone That I Used to Know."

A U.S. District Court has handed Apple a victory against one of its biggest competitors in the smartphone market by blocking U.S. sales of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh granted Apple a preliminary injunction against the Galaxy Nexus phone, which went on sale in the United States in mid-December.

This is the second Samsung Galaxy product blocked by Koh this week: On Tuesday, she granted Apple a preliminary injunction against U.S. sales of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet computer.

Koh granted the injunction after Apple argued that the Galaxy Nexus phone caused it irreparable harm due to long-term market-share loss and "losses of downstream sales," according to The Next Web.

Reuters reporter Dan Levine describedthe scene in the courtroom after the injunction was granted:...

Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes' split up is stealing the headlines today, but perhaps a more significant divorce is happening in the tech world: Twitter is leaving LinkedIn.

And by leaving, I mean leaving it without content.

Twitter reiterated on its blog Friday that it is no longer allowing third-party developers to use its content in ways that mimic the main Twitter experience. The post seemed a little curious, since Twitter announced the same thing early last year, but a while later LinkedIn posted a blog of its own announcing that  it will no longer display tweets, to comply with Twitter's policy.

That's bad news for LinkedIn, since so much of its users' content comes from Twitter, but we'll get to that in a bit.

LinkedIn, which noted its partnership with Twitter goes back to 2009, tries its best in the blog to reassure users the end isn't nigh. The social network for professionals emphasizes that while you can no longer connect your tweets to LinkedIn, you can share your LinkedIn posts...

Apple's voice assistant, Siri, was put under the microscope this week with a tough test and the arrival of a new opponent, and it did not fare well at all.

Siri, the signature feature of the Apple iPhone 4S that was introduced in October, has received a lot of criticism from consumers, with many saying it does not do many of the things Apple shows it doing in its commercials.

But those were only anecdotes until now, thanks to an analyst who has given Siri a rigorous test that shows she is currently doing poorly at her job.

Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray reportedly sent a note Thursday to clients explaining that he had asked Siri a series of 1,600 questions to get some hard data on how well it works and asked the same questions of the Google search engine for a comparison. Munster asked Siri 800 of the questions in a quiet room and asked the others out on the streets of Minneapolis.

His results showed Siri understood 83% of the questions asked during noisy situations and 89% in quiet...

A developer says he has discovered new wording in Facebook's code that indicates the social network could be testing or readying a "Want" button.

The developer, Tom Waddington, said the button's code appeared in Facebook's Javascript SDK as a tag that reads "<fb:wants>," and he has somehow gotten it to show up on his website, although it's still a work in progress. 

The button looks like Facebook's Like button and all its other buttons in that it has blue wording on top of a light blue bubble, but it also includes an icon with a plus button, based off of the one on Waddington's website. If you click it now, it'll say your name followed by "wants this." However, it'll also give you a very red "Error" message.

ROUNDUP: The freshest Facebook features

Inside Facebookpoints out that third-party Facebook developers have built Want buttons for their websites already, but those require users to accept their Facebook app before they can start using them. A Want button directly for the Menlo Park....

GameStop begins accepting pre-orders for the new Google Android tablet, the Nexus 7, Friday and the video game retailer is offering a few benefits that may lure some consumers to purchase the tablet from it.

The company is offering the 16-gigabyte version of the Nexus 7, which goes for $249, along with all the perks Google is throwing in, but it is also offering 30% trade bonus -- meaning the retailer will pay you more than it normally does for items you trade in -- on the tablet, along with the possibility of free shipping.

People can get the trade bonus through a variety of items, according to GameStop, which announced it was carrying the tablet Thursday. The company said those trades can include video game hardware, software, accessories, mobile Apple devices and certain Android tablets. 

The free shipping offer is actually to have a new tablet shipped to a GameStop near you, where you can then go pick it up, saving about $14 that you might pay if you ordered from Google instead.

In...

Today is the day for "iPhone 5" -- well, iPhone's 5th, actually.

It was five years ago today that the very first iPhone owners felt the addictive iGot-it rush of the hottest gadget on the planet at that time, Apple's revolutionary device. 

More than just an iPod that makes calls, the iPhone's debut and success shifted the already co-dependent relationship between people and their phones to more of a symbiotic synergy, encouraging and ushering in what has becoming a radical shift in digital lifestyle.

The iPhone: 5 years running

Though, when it was announced in early 2007, not everyone was sold. The folks at Research in Motion, which was having much better days back then, didn't believe what Apple was showing in the iPhone was even possible, according to reports.

Others just didn't believe it would resonate. Among them, David Platt wrote on his Suckbusters blog: "The forthcoming (June 29) release of the Apple iPhone is going to be a bigger marketing flop than Ishtar and Waterworld(dating...

When will the mantra "home, sweet home" shift to "home, smart home"?

For decades from about the 1950s, many expected that it would happen in the 21st century. In fact, it was a preoccupation expressed in books, amusement park exhibits, TV shows and movies.

The Pew Internet report, in conjunction with Elon University, found that 51% of survey participants agreed that by 2020, the connected household will have "become a model of efficiency, as people are able to manage consumption of resources (electricity, water, food, even bandwidth) in ways that place less of a burden on the environment while saving households money."

"Homes will get more efficient because it will...