Storm in a teacup?
When Amazon's European websites suffered an outage last night, there were fears the e-tailer, which kicked WikiLeaks off its servers last week, had been attacked by hactivists, but the firm has told reporters it was nothing sinister.
Much of the media immediately jumped to the conclusion that the retailer's website had been hit by attacks by Anonymous activists, still angry that Amazon had pulled the plug on WikiLeaks, after the website suffered an outage for around half an hour on Sunday night.
However, a spokeswoman told Reuters: "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."
The news service reported that Amazon.co.uk, amazon.es and amazon.fr were all offline for half an hour at around 9.30 pm UK time.
Hacktivist group Anonymous had urged its members to bombard Amazon with DDoS attacks in a bid to overwhelm and crash the site.
However, according to the BBC, Anonymous abandoned its bid to bring down Amazon on Friday, admitting it did not have the number of hacktivists to manage such a coup.
"We cannot attack Amazon, currently.The previous schedule was to do so, but we don't have enough forces," a post on Twitter reportedly read.
