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'Hardware failure' not hackers to blame for outage - Amazon

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By The Drum Team, Editorial

December 13, 2010 | 3 min read

Online store Amazon has blamed a "hardware failure", and not hackers, for its European websites being knocked offline last night during the crucial Christmas trading period.

Amazon.co.uk and the retailer's web stores serving France, Germany, Austria and Italy were down for about half an hour shortly after 9pm yesterday.

Rumours immediately circulated Twitter claiming the outage was the work of hacker group Anonymous, which had vowed to target companies, including Amazon, for withdrawing their services to whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.

But Amazon has blamed the downtime on a technical fault and, according to the BBC, the Anonymous group has distanced itself from the outage.

An Amazon spokesperson said: "The brief interruption to our European retail sites last night was due to hardware failure in our European datacentre network and not the result of a [distributed denial of service] attempt."

Last week Anonymous appeared to have its sights set on Amazon after mounting attacks on Mastercard and Visa, but it abandoned plans to take down the retailer on Friday, blaming a lack of "forces".

It has not taken responsibility for the Amazon outage and now says taking down the site would have been the wrong move anyway.

The BBC quotes a statement purporting to be from Anonymous as saying: "While it is indeed possible that Anonymous may not have been able to take Amazon.com down in a DDoS attack, this is not the only reason the attack never occurred.

"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.

"Simply put, attacking a major online retailer when people are buying presents for their loved ones would be in bad taste."

Amazon's sites are now back online.

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