Amazon websites outage was not due to WikiLeaks

Amazon.com's websites in Europe suffered an outage for more than half an hour on Sunday night, in what the company said was a hardware failure in its European data center network.

“The brief interruption to our European retail sites earlier today was due to hardware failure in our European datacenter network and not the result of a DDOS attempt,” a spokeswoman for Amazon told Reuters.

A loose grouping of activists operating under the name “Anonymous” had urged an online attack to crash the amazon.com site by overwhelming it with requests from users.

Amazon was among the first U.S. firms to pull the plug on WikiLeaks since it began publishing thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables, withdrawing hosting services last week after being questioned by the U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee.