Mother nature decided to give a little reality check to thousands of small (and not so small) businesses who rely on public cloud offerings to reach their masses. Her clouds decided to give ours a run for our money, when she unleashed a series of vicious storms on the Mid Atlantic region this weekend.

Lightning in Virginia took out part of Amazon Web Services Friday night rendering popular sites such as Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram unavailable for hours. The storm caused a power failure to the Northern Virginia data center where thousands of servers are stored. Unfortunately the center’s backup generator also failed.

Sound familiar?  Most of us have been there. And if you haven’t, wait awhile.  If it can happen to Amazon, it can happen to any of us.

My advice?  Limit your dependency on other people’s networks.  Invest in a hybrid approach — combine public and private cloud with some redundancy in-between.  Private cloud for mission critical applications, public for those applications you can afford not to control.

But know that even with the best-built data centers, mother nature may have the final word.