Amazon.com websites in Europe suffered an outage for more than half an hour last night, in what the company said was a hardware failure in its European data centre network.
"The brief interruption to our European retail sites earlier today was due to hardware failure in our European datacentre network and not the result of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attempt," a spokeswoman for Amazon said late last night.
Amazon was among the first US firms to pull the plug on WikiLeaks since it began publishing thousands of 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.
Amazon.co.uk, amazon.de, amazon.fr and amazon.es were all down for more than 30 minutes until about 9.45pm Irish time 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 last week.
On Saturday, 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.
Reuters