As of just a little after 21:15 GMT on December 12th all domains hosted at Amazon’s Ireland data centre suffered about half an hour of downtime.

As of just a little after 21:15 GMT on December 12th all domains hosted at Amazon’s Ireland data centre suffered about half an hour of downtime. This did not only affect Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, Amazon.it and Amazon.at, but also over a third of all web-facing servers in Ireland.

Initial reports pushed the blame toward the group Anonymous - The “hacking” team behind Operation Payback that targeted MasterCard, Visa and PayPal following the arrest of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.  The group also attempted, and failed, to disrupt Amazon’s US web services earlier last week. It is widely known that Wikileaks were using Amazon’s web services, but Amazon had since pulled the site down due to its activity and perhaps, negative portrayal in the media.

During the downtime, Anonymous themselves tweeted, “We can’t confirm anything because we’ll lose our accounts again,” which does in some way take credit for the downtime that Amazon experienced.

By 21:44 GMT, all Amazon’s European web services appeared to be back online, the AWS Health Dashboard made note of elevated error rates and connection issues, and also showing zero errors since.

And there was another impact of the downtime which has been missed in most of the media reporting. Marks and Spencer’s main website is powered by the Amazon Enterprise Webstore technology platform and was also affected by the downtime. With the downtime coinciding with a lengthy (and expensive) commercial in the final break of X-Factor, this was certainly a costly blip for M&S.

The most important question here is how did this downtime affect the thousands of retailers using Amazon’s third-party marketplace as a sales channel? Whilst half an hour of downtime is not all that bad and still conforms to most goals of six nines uptime throughout a year, this is still expected to be the largest online shopping season to date. Obviously there will be no compensation to retailers who were impacted by this issue and it unlikely that these merchants will stop selling through the Amazon platform, but I’m sure it will provide food for thought for the thousands of retailers that rely on Amazon for a significant proportion of their online revenue.

Sam Clarke, ChannelAdvisor Customer Launch Specialist

 

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