Amazon says outage in Europe due to hardware failure, not hacking attack

Amazon says that the outage which made its UK, Italian, German and Spanish sites unavailable for about half an hour on Sunday night was due to a hardware failure, and not an attack by online activists angry at its stance on WikiLeaks.

"The brief interruption to our European retail sites earlier today was due to hardware failure in our European datacenter network and not the result of a DDOS attempt," a spokeswoman for Amazon told Reuters. The different countries' sites are all served through systems there.

Amazon was among the first American companies to stop providing services to WikiLeaks when it took the site off its EC2 cloud computing service at the end of November. That followed political pressure in the US, though Amazon insisted the decision was because WikiLeaks did not have the rights to the content.

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