Charles Arthur and Josh Halliday guardian.co.uk, Sunday 12 December 2010
The online shopping site Amazon was briefly offline this evening in the UK, Germany, Italy and France and an unknown number of other countries, possibly after a denial of service attack launched by Anonymous, a loose group sympathetic to – but unconnected with – WikiLeaks.
But others suggested that the failure was due to an internal error affecting the Irish data centre that runs the site in those four countries.
In the UK the site was unreachable, and attempts to connect to the US site also failed initially, though that site rapidly came back online at about 9.30pm. The site was also reported to be down in Italy and France.
Meanwhile Mastercard's main site was also knocked offline, according to the web stats service Netcraft.
Also today, in a separate incident, the gossip website Gawker announced that its encrypted database of 1.5 million user names and passwords used for commenting had been cracked by a "brute-force" attack. Although Gawker does not collect credit card details, the risk is that those of its users who use the same password and name on other sites could see their identities compromised.
"We're deeply embarrassed by this breach," said the operators of the site, part of a network of blogs owned by Nick Denton. "We should not be in the position of relying on the goodwill of the hackers who identified the weakness in our systems."
Amazon could not be reached for comment on whether its sites' failure was due to an attack, or simply because it was one of the busiest online shopping nights of the year in the runup to Christmas. The sites in Canada, US, China and Japan were apparently unaffected.
Full story at The Guardian.
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