Amazon has terminated the account of Wikileaks and apparently the site has been down most of the day. Joe Lieberman has issued a statement on Amazon’s decision. Amazon has not commented directly on what happened to Wikileaks account. But they appear to have told Lieberman — or that’s the clear import of Lieberman’s statement — that they unilaterally terminated the account.

[Update: Wikileaks has reportedly moved the documents back to its original Swedish hosting service, though that is unconfirmed. They seem to be back up online. — 3:00 pm.]

Most consumers aren’t aware of this. But in addition to the Amazon retailer you know, Amazon has also become a big, big player in the ‘cloud’ web hosting market. I assume they’re the largest. But I do not know that last point for certain. Regardless, they’re a huge player in the market. A few parts of TPM, though not the whole site, is hosted in the Amazon cloud.

When I’d heard that Amazon had agreed to host Wikileaks I was frankly surprised given all the fish a big corporation like Amazon has to fry with the federal government.