In addition to their retail business, amazon.com is a major player in the “cloud” hosting market; their hosting service is known as the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2. When Wikileaks’ servers in Sweden were hammered by a DOS (distributed Denial Of Service) attack, Julian Assange opened an account with Amazon to host Wikileaks in the cloud, because the “virtual server” EC2 system is designed to be highly resistant to these kinds of attacks.

Today amazon.com closed the account of Wikileaks, with no official explanation so far.

The Associated Press says Wikileaks is going to move back to its Swedish web host.