Amazon Blames Crash On Hardware, Not Hackers

Amazon sites in Europe were offline for half an hour on Sunday, but the online seller says the problem was due to hardware faults, not an attack inspired by the continuing WikiLeaks cyber-war.

The Amazon sites for the UK, Germany, Italy and France were all out for about half an hour around 9pm Sunday night. Amazon had been a target of reprisals last week, for removing WikiLeaks from its servers, but the outage was apparently caused by hardware problems, not a denial of service (DoS) attack.

WikiLeaks distances itself from reprisals

“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 DDoS attempt,” Amazon said in a statement to eWEEK Europe.

Network monitor Netcraft observed that all the Amazon sites affected were served form the same data centre in Ireland, and the Anonymous group behind the WikiLeaks reprisals is apparently focusing on financial bodies such as PayPal and Mastercard, that have stopped processing payments for the whistleblowing site that began publishing thousands of confidential US embassy documents two weeks ago.

WikiLeaks has distanced itself from the reprisals carried out in its name by the Anonymous group of “hacktivists“, who have previously carried out attacks on music industry sites involved in efforts to crack down on file-sharing.

The head of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, who is currently under arrest in Britain, and contesting his extradition to Sweden on rape charges, has denied any connection with the illegal attacks that have hit Internet sites which have withdrawn support for WikiLeaks.

For WikiLeaks, the question is no longer about whether it will get shut down soon, but about money. Instead of a single DNS provider, the site now has a round-robin setup of at least 14 DNS providers directing traffic to its domain name, of which it now has several.