Amazon European Outage and More WikiLeaks Controversy

Amazon.com's European websites went down last night for about a half hour, which Amazon claimed was a result of a hardware failure in a European data center, and not a result of a hacking DoS attack, as some have suggested.

The hacking theory comes from the recent Wikileaks controversy, where Amazon servers--which had originally been hosting the site for some time--decided to stop providing cloud service for the popular information leak site. Because of the controversy, many claims that "hacktivists" in support of Wikileaks--the group "Anonymous"--were behind a DoS attack that brought down the website for a brief time last night. However, the plans and claims to attack Amazon by the group were reported as abandoned, due to lack of resources (Amazon is a highly visited website, one can imagine that it would be quite difficult to cause a DoS attack).

The worry that Amazon had been effected by a DDoS attack also comes from the recent attacks against Mastercard, Visa, and PayPal for also abandoning WikiLeaks (which someone has already detailed in this blog ). However the group has more plans, such as attempting to access the diplomatic cables which were unpublished in the recent leak, and distribute the most dramatic ones across the internet

But again, the resulting downtime was only due to a hardware failure in the main European Data center, and Amazon's UK, German, Spanish, and French sites were all restored less than 30 minutes after the failure.