The USA is no stranger to extreme weather, the sweltering hot summer alone is proof of that. And now, with the 2012 hurricane season now upon us, those living on the east and gulf coasts are bracing themselves for storms that have the potential to quite literally tear the house down.

Anyone else who is fortunate enough not to live in the path of a hurricane probably won’t be too concerned about the havoc these storms can wreck – after all, it can’t possibly affect them can it?

Well, depending on how much you depend on the internet, there could well be consequences the next time a category 4 beast slams into the east coast. You might be surprised to learn that hurricanes are so powerful that, potentially, they could take a huge chunk of the web offline if they land up in the right place.

A new infographic from Slashdot warns that this possibility isn’t as remote as we’d like to think. The internet’s biggest vulnerability is its servers, and there happens to be several major cloud computing centers located in Virginia, which for those who don’t already know, lies right in the path of any hurricane that gets blown north.

Virginia, which was hit by hurricanes in 2003 and 2004, is home to both Amazon and Rackspace. A worst case scenario – in which one or all of these centers are destroyed by a hurricane – could see dozens of websites, including Instagram, Pinterest, Netflix and Reddit (all of which are supported by Amazon), taken out in one fell swoop.

It’s not just your entertainment that will be affected though. The US government also stores a ton of data on Amazon’s cloud servers, for websites such as Energy.gov and Recovery.gov.

While the possibility of a hurricane knocking out one of these centers remains remote, there are two concerns. The first one is the government’s growing reliance on using cloud servers to store its information, which could one day include medical records and possibly even information on weapons. Second, there’s the threat of global warming, which scientists say could lead to more frequent and increasingly severe storms in the future.

Click Infographic to enlarge: