Amazon has finally pulled the plug on WikiLeaks, leaving the whistle-blowing website unavailable until the traffic was redirected to Europe. WikiLeaks first directed the traffic to Sweden, and then included a second server in France. WikiLeaks announced the move on their Twitter stream:
The United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs subsequently issued a press release announcing that Amazon had severed ties with WikiLeaks. The introduction to this announcement clearly states that Amazon.com decided to terminate its relationship with WikiLeaks, although the government may have spurred this decision by reportedly asking, “Are there plans to take the site down?”
The committee contacted Amazon on Tuesday after reading press reports that the WikiLeaks site was being hosted by Amazon. The site was taken down by Amazon the following morning. This could suggest that the government was able to exert some influence on the decision – WikiLeaks had been using Amazon’s EC2 hosting service since October, when the Iraq War Logs were published. The cablegate site also used EC2 from the moment it was launched on Sunday.
Incidentally, two sentences in Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman’s statement may have been added as an afterthought, or added by someone else, as it appears in a slightly different colour to the rest of the text in the statement:
The chairman encouraged foreign companies to make the same decision as Amazon, although whether this will happen remains to be seen.
WikiLeaks is now served from two IP addresses in Europe: one is hosted by Bahnhof Internet in Sweden, and the other is at OVH in France. Both www.wikileaks.org and cablegate.wikileaks.org are being served from these IP addresses, and have been showing good response times since the move.
Real-time performance graphs for both sites are available here: