Amazon knocked offline by 'hardware failure'

Online retailer Amazon has said its European websites were temporarily offline because of a "hardware failure", reports BBC News.

British, French, German, Austrian and Italian sites were down for about 30 minutes on Sunday during a peak pre-Christmas shopping period.

The outage occurred during a time of ongoing threats against major sites by pro-Wikileak activists.

A group known as Anonymous is targeting firms, including Amazon, that withdrew services from the whistle-blowing site.

"The brief interruption to our European retail sites last night was due to hardware failure in our European datacentre network and not the result of a [distributed denial of service] attempt," said a spokesperson for the firm.

Amazon sites ending .it, .de, .uk, .fr and .at - which are all hosted in Dublin - were unavailable for about half an hour at about 2115 GMT on Sunday, according to a Twitter posting by web monitoring firm Netcraft.

However, all servers are now back up and running after a brief delay, the firm says.