Shopping website Amazon went offline for a brief period with a group of “hacktivists” suggesting they may be responsible.
Amazon.co.uk was unreachable, while the company’s French, German and Italian domains were also experiencing problems.
However, after about half an hour on Sunday night the UK site was working again, a relief to thousands of Christmas shoppers.
Anonymous, a group of online hacktivists who support the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, has claimed responsibility for a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in the past week.
The attacks have disrupted the websites of companies including Visa, Mastercard and PayPal by bombarding them with millions of visits in revenge for withdrawing WikiLeaks’ services.
A message on a Twitter account used by the activists, Anonops, read: “We cant confirm anything because we’ll lose our accounts again. Be alert and you will realize.”
An earlier post which quoted Abraham Lincoln read: “Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.”
Several accounts attributed to Anonymous and its campaign, dubbed Operation Payback, have been suspended over the attacks.
Earlier in the week the group appeared to abort an attack against Amazon after it failed to make any impact on the site’s performance.
DDoS attacks, which are illegal in the UK, involve overloading a website with high numbers of requests so it stops working.
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