Amazon blames hardware – not hackers – for European outage

Problems with Amazon's systems in Europe over the weekend were down to hardware failure rather than hackers, the e-commerce giant said on Sunday.

Christmas shoppers trying to complete purchases from Amazon's online stores in the UK, France, Germany, Austria and Italy were locked out for around half an hour on Sunday. Amazon famously withdrew services from whistle-blower website Wikileaks at the start of the month, a move that potentially made it a target for attacks from Anonymous.

However, Amazon said the temporary outage was caused by "hardware failure" at a Dublin-based hosting facility that serves the sites. Web services monitoring firm Netcraft confirmed this diagnosis, adding that the affected sites were affected by around half an hour of downtime at around 21.15 GMT on Sunday.

A statement from Anonymous denied launching an attack against Amazon, arguing that such a move would be counterproductive, in PR terms, as well as difficult in practice. Amazon's distributed system makes it more resilient against distributed denial of service attacks, if not hardware failure.

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