If you were trying to shop online via Amazon over the weekend, you might have had some trouble. European visitors to shopping giant Amazon encountered nearly 30 minutes of downtime on Sunday, preventing visitors from UK, France, Italy, Germany, and Austria from getting their Christmas shopping done. The culprit wasn’t Wikileaks hackers from Operation Payback looking to get some revenge on Amazon, though; Amazon was knocked offline by a hardware failure at their Dublin, Ireland, data center.
“While it is indeed possible that Anonymous may not have been able to take Amazon.com down in a DDoS attack, this is not the only reason the attack never occurred,” said a spokesman from the hacker group Anonymous. “After the attack was so advertised in the media, we felt that it would affect people such as consumers in a negative way and make them feel threatened by Anonymous. Simply put, attacking a major online retailer when people are buying presents for their loved ones would be in bad taste.”
What Anonymous wouldn’t do, Amazon’s traffic numbers did. It’s awful when hardware problems knock your website offline, but it happens when you’re dealing with a whole lot of people trying to access the same servers.
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