Amazon has suffered outages on both its UK and US websites in what some observers are speculating is a planned attack.

The US website was out of action for about two hours on Friday, and both were unavailable for about an hour yesterday. Visitors to the sites were met with an error message.

Website analysts Narus told PC Pro that the problem may have been caused by an attack on Amazon’s Internet Movie Database. But other observers have downplayed the claim, suggesting it was simply user error or a configuration glitch.

After Friday’s outage, the company implied that the problems were not caused by an attack. “Amazon’s systems are very complex and, on rare occasions, despite our best efforts, they may experience problems,” it said in a statement. X