This article was published on December 12, 2010

All of Amazon’s European domains are down. [Updated: Sites are live again]


All of Amazon’s European domains are down. [Updated: Sites are live again]

See updates at the foot of the post.

It appears that the UK domain for online retailer Amazon is down. With reports all over Twitter and confirmed by TNW personally, the site does not appear to be responding regardless of the location from which you’re trying to access it.

Catching you up to speed, it is entirely possible that Anonymous, the 4chan-started “hacking” group could be behind the down time. The group, which has tossed attacks at MasterCard, Visa and PayPal since the arrest of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has claimed in the past that it would target Amazon. It was widely known that Wikileaks was using the Amazon DNS services, and Amazon then pulled the site from the services due to its activities.

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Interestingly, and as a testament to how some offshoot groups of Anonymous don’t always “follow the leader”, one sect of the group recently released a statement in which it explained why it wouldn’t target Amazon.

At the moment, a trip over to the .co.uk and .de domains of Amazon simply show an unavailable notice. We’ll be keeping up with the story and let you know more details as we find them.

Update: Since our first publishing of this story, it now appears that all European domains of Amazon are down. If they are accessible at all, it is only with an error page:

It does appear that some offshoot of Anonymous is behind the attacks. In a now-deleted Tweet, it was noted that the sites are down, but no credit was taken:

However, according to Adrian Chen from Gawker, the talk inside of the Anonymous IRC channel is all surrounding an attack on MasterCard and there is only confusion concerning the European Amazon servers.

Most recently, the @AnonOps Twitter account does somewhat take credit for the downtime:

As of 9:44pm UK time, all of the Europoean Amazon sites appear to be back online. We have contacted Amazon for comment and will update this post as we find more information. In the mean time, it is worth noting that Amazon’s AWS Service Health Dashboard does continue to show elevated error rates for services under the EU domains.

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