Amazon says that the outage which made its UK, Italian, German and Spanish sites unavailable for about half an hour on Sunday night was due to a hardware failure, and not an attack by online activists angry at its stance on WikiLeaks.
"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. That followed political pressure in the US, though Amazon insisted the decision was because WikiLeaks did not have the rights to the content.
The 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. But that fizzled out at the end of last week.
Amazon.co.uk, amazon.de, amazon.fr and amazon.es were all down for more than 30 minutes until around 2145 GMT when they appeared to work normally again. Amazon.com's U.S. website was unaffected.
The "Anonymous" activists briefly brought down the sites of credit-card giants MasterCard and Visa which had stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks.
On Saturday, a statement apparently on behalf of Anonymous said it had changed its strategy and would now focus on spreading snippets of the leaked cables far and wide rather than on cyber attacks.
On Sunday, neither the blog site that Anonymous had been using for its public statements nor the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) chat channel that organisers had been using was available.
Update: Amazon's Amazon Web Services Health Dashboard for Europe for Amazon EC2 in Ireland reports:
[RESOLVED] Elevated error rates and latencies for EC2 APIs
1:15 PM PST We are investigating elevated error rates and latencies for the EC2 APIs in EU-WEST-1.
2:14 PM PST We continue to work to restore EC2 API connectivity in the EU-WEST-1 region. Running instances were not affected and are operating normally.
2:59 PM PST Connectivity to the APIs has been restored. No running instances were affected. The service is now operating normally.
Dec 13, 12:52 AM PST Here is additional information for the event that happened on December 12th. Between 12:37 PM and 2:32 PM PST the EC2 APIs in the EU-West region experienced significantly increased error rates rendering the EU APIs unusable for most customers. Running instances were not affected, but EU EC2 users were unable to launch new instances or describe their resources in the EU-West region. These errors were caused by the malfunction of a second network device carrying traffic that had recently been shifted off of another failed network device. The first device was nearly repaired but, unfortunately, was still unusable when the second device independently failed. Because full redundancy had not been restored to this part of our network, this second failure resulted in an interruption of connectivity for the EU EC2 API servers. Our networking team was able to re-route traffic to restore connectivity and, shortly afterward, complete repairs on both network devices involved. Though it's somewhat unusual to have two failures like this in this short a period, we will not accept this as a statistical anomaly. We're going to reassess our strategy for keeping spare devices to have better coverage in situations such as these.
(Sorry, there's no hyperlink for it. Thanks @suppalpation for the pointer.)
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