WASHINGTON – Amazon.com has stopped hosting WikiLeaks’s website, the US Senate Homeland Security Committee chairman said yesterday.
The move comes after Senator Joe Lieberman’s staff made inquiries to Amazon on Tuesday as news reports surfaced that WikiLeaks had hired the Internet giant to host the website loaded with secret government documents on the Amazon servers because hackers had targeted the WikiLeaks site.
“I wish that Amazon had taken this action earlier based on WikiLeaks’ previous publication of classified material,” Mr Lieberman, an independent, said.
“I call on any other company or organisation that is hosting WikiLeaks to immediately terminate its relationship with them,” he added.
WikiLeaks has said since Sunday, when the first of its latest cache of US government documents were published by media outlets, that its site was the target of a “distributed denial of service” attack, which is a computer attack meant to overwhelm a website and render it unavailable.
WikiLeaks is under US criminal investigation for the release.
Amazon, widely known for its retail site, also offers various web services, including hosting for websites. – (Reuters)