Earlier today, Amazon.com took down the cloud servers that were being used by WikiLeaks to serve their site. One of the products Amazon sells is space on their cloud servers at a very competitive rate. Thousands of websites, including WikiLeaks, use their service.

Amazon.com gave no notice to WikiLeaks. Normally, in an ethical and legal business relationship, notice is given when contracts are terminated to allow for smooth transition. In fact, if WikiLeaks had chosen to terminate the contract with Amazon, they would have been required to give 30 days notice.

Amazon.com gave no such notice, they just unplugged the servers. As a result, WikiLeaks was down for several hours today.

Why did they do this? Amazon.com got a call from Senator Joe Lieberman who threatened to start a boycott. Other officials reportedly leaned on Amazon. I can understand Amazon’s fear of the government, but that is no excuse to unethically target a customer without notice.

In the past year, Antiwar.com has received about $10,000 from Amazon.com for referrals on the sale of books and merchandise. We cannot continue to profit from or deal with Amazon.com. We are removing the Amazon ads and book widgets from our website, and urge other supporters of WikiLeaks to join the boycott.