According to a statement by the US Senator Joe Lieberman’s office, Amazon Web Services has discontinued providing its cloud computing services to WikiLeaks, the organization that has published hundreds of thousands of classified diplomatic communications of the US government on its website.

“This morning Amazon informed my staff that it has ceased to host the WikiLeaks website,” Lieberman said in a statement issued 1 December. “I wish that Amazon had taken this action earlier based on WikiLeaks’ previous publication of classified material.”

AWS provides Infrastructure as a Service through its Elastic Compute Cloud and other cloud-based IT services. It is one of the world’s biggest public-cloud providers.

In a twitter post, a WikiLeaks representative wrote that the organization’s servers were “ousted” from Amazon. “Free speech, the land of the free – fine, our dollars are now spent to employ people in Europe,” the tweet read.  “If Amazon are so uncomfortable with the first amendment, they should get out of the business of selling books,” read another WikiLeaks tweet.

AWS representatives did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
Late last week, WikiLeaks said the servers it was using came under a Distributed Denial of Service attack, causing the site to shut down. News of the attack came after the organization released the first portion of a series of diplomatic cables exchanged between the US State Department and embassies from around the world.

The cables, total of about 250,000, date from 1966 to February of 2010 and originate from 274 embassies, according to WikiLeaks. The organization’s plan is to release the entire group of documents, titled “Cablegate”, in phases over the next several months.  The first group of documents was released on 28 Nov. and was followed by the DDoS attack, according to the organization.