Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, Amazon.it and Amazon.at suffered approximately half an hour of downtime at around 21:15 GMT. The cause is not yet apparent, although all of these sites share one thing in common: they are all hosted at Amazon’s data centre in Ireland.

Amazon’s service health dashboard reported elevated error rates and latencies for the EC2 APIs in the EU-WEST-1 region, so many other sites may have been affected (Amazon accounts for more than a third of all web-facing computers in Ireland).

The Anonymous group behind Operation Payback had intended to carry out another attack against Amazon after last week’s attempt failed to have any impact on Amazon.com. However, the websites and IRC servers operated by Anonymous suggest that the current target is still mastercard.com.

Real-time performance graphs for these Amazon sites can be viewed at http://uptime.netcraft.com/perf/reports/performance/wikileaks