Amazon has claimed a power outage caused its UK and Europe sites to go down yesterday and insisted the brief stoppage was nothing to do with Wikileaks-supporting hackers.

A spokeswoman said a hardware failure, and not an attack by online activists angry
at its stance on Wikileaks, was to blame.

“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. The
different countries’ sites are all served through systems there.

Amazon
was among the first American companies to stop providing services to
WikiLeaks when it took the site off its EC2 cloud computing service at
the end of November. T

Online activists Anonymous had claimed responsibility after a distributed denial-of-service attack of the type that has also hit Visa, Mastercard and PayPal in recent days.

The group bombarded the company websites with millions of visits in revenge for withdrawing WikiLeaks’ services, making it more difficult for the whistleblowing website to raise funds from donations.

A message was posted by Twitter account Anonops reading: “We cant confirm anything because we’ll lose our accounts again. Be alert and you will realize.”