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East coast blizzard: travel bans across US but forecasters row back on dire warnings, How long will it take for the media to turn on forecasters and public officials for over-reacting? Forecasters originally said the storm could bring 1 to 3 feet of snow and punishing hurricane-force winds. The east coast is starting to wake up to a bad snowstorm - but nothing as dramatic as forecast.

Alex Hern has more on those problems at Facebook and Instagram that caused brief panic among snowbound Americans in the north-east.

Multiple major social networks failed Tuesday morning, including Facebook, Tinder, Instagram, AOL Instant Messenger, and Hipchat. The services have since recovered.

The cause of the outage, which began around 6:20am GMT and ended 40 minutes later, is not yet known. One leading candidate is an attack on the company’s DNS servers, which turn requests for a specific URL (such as Facebook.com) into an actual IP address, which points to one server on the internet.

However the outage occurred, it hit both the websites and apps of the affected services. Facebook-owned Instagram returned a “can’t refresh feed” error, while the Facebook website itself simply failed to resolve in the browser.

Facebook’s failure seemed to be so major that it has cascaded into app such as Tinder that rely on the social network for login functionality.

Yet not every Facebook-owned service failed. WhatsApp, acquired by Mark Zuckerberg’s company in February 2014, remains functional.

Facebook has not yet responded to requests for comment, and has not said anything publicly about the outage, although Instagram tweeted that it was aware of the failure and working to fix it.

This is Mark Tran picking up the baton in London. It did not long for people to joke about the storms and outages that made Facebook and Instagram temporarily inaccessible in the US, Asia, the UK and Australia.

A blizzard warning has been issued for Suffolk county in New York. The advisory warns of severe conditions and dangerous travel conditions:

A blizzard warning means severe winter weather conditions are expected or occurring. Falling and blowing snow with strong winds and poor visibilities will lead to whiteout conditions..making travel extremely dangerous. Do not travel. If you must travel...have a winter survival kit with you.

My colleague Oliver Laughland has posted this summary of events so far:

Snowfall has not yet reached the historic levels predicted in New York City and across the north-east of America, with forecasters beginning to row back from predictions of an historic snowstorm engulfing the region.
Governors in states including New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts imposed wide ranging travel bans throughout affected regions, with snowfall as deep as three feet predicted overnight.

In New York City the mayor Bill De Blasio took the drastic step of closing the subway system, one of the largest and oldest in the world, at 11pm as the travel ban came into play. All vehicles were banned from roads in 13 counties in New York, with drivers facing $300 fines if caught in violation of the restrictions.
By 1:30 EST, however, some forecasters appeared to have downgraded the predicted levels of snowfall to around a foot in New York City. Predictions were still as high as two feet in Boston, Massachusetts.

Around 6,500 flights in the region were cancelled, with many not expected for rescheduling until Wednesday. Train routes between New York and Boston were also cancelled. National Guard troops were also deployed around the north-east to assist first responders. Blizzard warnings and travel bans remain in place throughout the region as heavy snowfall is forecast to continue into Tuesday.
I’ll be taking over our live coverage as conditions continue to change throughout the night.

The latest weather updates in New York City indicate that moderate to heavy snow is still expected over the new several hours:

The National Weather Service has also cancelled the winter storm warning for Philadelphia. A winter weather advisory will instead be in effect until 3pm EST:

The National Weather Service in Mount Holly has issued a winter weather advisory for snow and blowing snow...which is in effect until 3pm EST this afternoon. The winter storm warning has been cancelled.

A winter weather advisory means that periods of snow, sleet or freezing rain can cause travel difficulties, and people are advised to prepare for slippery roads and limited visibility.