The scheduled attack against Amazon.com has been called off after it failed to make any impact on the site’s performance.

The Anonymous group decided the “hive” of computers in its botnet was not big enough to take on the might of Amazon, who are evidently quite good at providing highly scalable web hosting services, not just on their own website, but also on their EC2 service. Their European datacenter, which formerly hosted the WikiLeaks website, accounts for more than a third of all internet-facing web servers in Ireland.

Operation Payback still intend to carry out a distributed denial of service attack against Amazon.com, but appear unable do so without more volunteers taking part in their botnet. The botnet currently contains around 2000 computers, each of which can receive attack commands from the group’s IRC network.

It is likely that other computers are also involved in the attacks. The group’s network of IRC servers is under a fair amount of load, with some servers refusing connections, and others already at their user limits. To solve this problem, some ‘hacktivists’ are instead using a browser-based JavaScript version of the LOIC tool. Clicking on the “IMMA CHARGING MAH LAZER” button causes the page to make a large volume of requests to the target site.