Amazon Blames Outage on Hardware Failure, Not Hackers
European shoppers were unable to access Amazon.com for more than 30 minutes Sunday night, but hackers were not to blame, the popular e-tailer said.
"The brief interruption to our European retail sites earlier today was due to hardware failure in our European data center network and not the result of a DDoS attempt," an Amazon spokeswoman told Reuters.
Conspiracy theorists may have trouble believing Amazon's statement after a group of activists urged whoever would listen to crash the site by overwhelming its servers. The reason? Amazon was one of the first U.S. hosting services to kick WikiLeaks to the curb after the whistleblower site published sensitive, and potentially embarrassing, U.S. diplomatic cables.
Before Amazon went down in Europe, the above mentioned activist group said its efforts would be better spent on spreading the cables than attacking websites.
