Amazon’s websites in Europe suffered an outage for more than half an hour on Sunday night, in what the company said was a hardware failure in its European data center network.
The web shopping giant flatly denied it had fallen victim to denial of service attacks from Wikileaks supporters, who last week added the company to its hitlist. “The brief interruption to our European retail sites earlier today was due to hardware failure in our European data centre network and not the result of a DDOS attempt,” a spokeswoman for Amazon told Reuters.
Amazon was among the first US firms to pull the plug on Wikileaks since it began publishing thousands of US diplomatic cables, withdrawing hosting services last week after being questioned by the US Senate Homeland Security Committee.
A loose grouping of activists operating under the name “Anonymous” had urged an online attack to crash the amazon.com site by overwhelming it with requests from users.
However, the site didn’t go down, and Anonymous claimed to have cancelled the attack so as not to interfere with Christmas shopping.
Amazon.co.uk, amazon.de, amazon.fr and amazon.es were all down for more than 30 minutes until around 2145 GMT when they appeared to work normally again. Amazon.com’s US website was unaffected.
The activists briefly brought down the sites of credit-card giants MasterCard and Visa which had stopped processing donations to Wikileaks.
Anonymous said it had changed its strategy and would now focus on spreading snippets of the leaked cables far and wide rather than on cyber attacks.
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