British, French, German, Austrian and Italian sites were down for about 30 minutes on Sunday during a peak pre-Christmas shopping period. The outage occurred during a time of ongoing threats against major sites by pro-Wikileak activists. A group known as Anonymous is targeting firms, including Amazon, that withdrew services from the whistle-blowing site.
“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,” said a spokesperson for the firm.
Amazon sites ending .it, .de, .uk, .fr and .at— which are all hosted in Dublin— were unavailable for about half an hour at about 21:15 GMT on Sunday, according to a Twitter posting by web monitoring firm Netcraft. However, all servers are now back up and running after a brief delay, the firm says.
