14 DAY TRIAL // Amazon sites in Europe suffered a 30 minute outage on Sunday. The company blamed hardware failure in one of its data centers for the outage and said that it was not the result of an attack on its infrastructure. The company had been under threat of a DDoS attack ever since it dropped the WikiLeaks account from its Web Services platform.
"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," an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement.
Amazon's sites for some of the biggest markets in Europe, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr and Amazon.es, were unavailable of a period of time ending at about 21:46 GMT, according to Reuters.
There is no indication that the problem is linked to threats from the hacktivist group Anonymous. The group had previously aimed to mount a DDoS attack against the web giant but later publicly renounced its plans.
"After the attack was so advertised in the media, we felt that it would affect people such as consumers in a negative way and make them feel threatened by Anonymous," a statement from Anonymous late last week read.
"Simply put, attacking a major online retailer when people are buying presents for their loved ones, would be in bad taste," it added.
The group had previously taken down sites from MasterCard and Visa and affected the operations of PayPal. Amazon was to be the next big target, but the attack was abandoned.
Anonymous has now shifted its strategy to analyzing and exposing the data from the leaked cables. The new plan is to make the data as public and widespread as possible, in order to help WikiLeak's cause of bringing more openness to the dealings of governments and corporations.