Source:
The GuardianThe 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.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/dec/12/amazon-uk-offline-christmas