Amazon has denied reports a loss of service on Sunday night was caused by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack by Wikileaks supporters.
The online retailer claims a hardware failure caused the half-hour outage on several European sites Sunday evening, rather than an attack by hacktivists seeking revenge for it cutting ties with the whistle-blowing website.
“The brief interruption to our European retail sites last night was due to hardware failure in our European data centre network and not the result of a DDOS attempt,” a spokesman told Telecoms Europe.net.
Sites in Spain, France, UK and Germany were affected by the outage, the Guardian reported.
All of the sites are hosted on Amazon’s data center in Ireland according to web security firm Netcraft.
Many news outlets connected the dots between the service failure and continuing attacks by a group of hacktivists calling themselves Anonymous, which has pledged revenge on several firms for cutting support for Wikileaks.
The group attempted DDoS attacks on Visa and MasterCard last week, while a similar attempt on Amazon’s US site was reportedly only averted by the firm’s huge bank of servers which allowed it to transfer capacity to keep the site running.
Netcraft said the attack on MasterCard is continuing.
Police in the Netherlands have released one of two teenagers arrested in connection with the attacks, Reuters reported.