Washington - Amazon.com has stopped hosting WikiLeaks' website, which posted thousands of classified US government documents this week, the US Senate Homeland Security Committee chairperson said on Wednesday.
The move comes after Senator Joe Lieberman's staff made inquiries to Amazon on Tuesday as news reports surfaced that WikiLeaks had hired the Internet giant to host the website loaded with secret government documents on the Amazon servers because hackers had targeted the WikiLeaks site.
“I wish that Amazon had taken this action earlier based on WikiLeaks' previous publication of classified material,” Lieberman, an independent, said in a statement.
“I call on any other company or organisation that is hosting WikiLeaks to immediately terminate its relationship with them,” he added.
WikiLeaks has said since Sunday, when the first of its latest cache of US government documents were published by media outlets, that its site was the target of a “distributed denial of service” attack, which is a computer attack meant to overwhelm a website and render it unavailable.
WikiLeaks is under US criminal investigation for the release.
Amazon, widely known for its retail site, also offers various web services, including hosting for websites.
WikiLeaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson said he was unaware of the latest situation on servers, but said: “We have ways and means to bypass any closure of our services.”
A representative for Amazon did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Lieberman said that even though Amazon had ended its relationship with WikiLeaks, he still planned to ask Amazon about its relationship with the site and what the company would do in the future if confronted with a similar situation.
WikiLeaks obtained scores of internal US State Department communications, some of which were classified and included candid and embarrassing assessments of world leaders, and released them via media outlets and its own website. - Reuters