Amazon blames crash on technical fault

But the firm denied that "hacktivists" were responsible, attributing the disruption to technical issues instead. A spokesman said the brief interruption to the company's European retail sites was due to a hardware failure in a European data centre network and not hackers.

Amazon.co.uk was unreachable for about half an hour, while the company's French, German and Italian domains also experienced problems.

Anonymous, a group of online hacktivists supporting the WikiLeaks website, has claimed responsibility for a series of attacks in the past week.

The attacks disrupted websites of companies including Visa, Mastercard and PayPal by bombarding them with millions of visits in revenge for withdrawing WikiLeaks' services.