In a much-anticipated public statement explaining its decision to halt providing cloud services to WikiLeaks, Amazon Web Services said it made the decision because the organization used its infrastructure to store and serve materials it did not hold the rights to.

"It's clear that WikiLeaks doesn't own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content," read the statement posted on the provider's website. "Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren't putting innocent people in jeopardy."

The provider said that by serving the materials it did own using its infrastructure, WikiLeaks had violated its terms of service, which require that the user owns or otherwise controls "all of the rights of the content." The organization has had other classified documents and video content that was leaked to it on its website before the most recent release of aforementioned documents.

AWS also denied suggestions in numerous news reports that came out since the "Cablegate" scandal began last Sunday that it had cancelled its services to WikiLeaks because of pressure from the US Senator Joe Lieberman's office.

"There have been reports that a government inquiry prompted us not to serve WikiLeaks any longer," AWS representatives wrote. "That is inaccurate."

The news that WikiLeaks was denied service by AWS originally came from Lieberman's office on 1 December. In a statement, the senator said that the provider had informed his staff that it had "ceased to host the WikiLeaks website."

The provider halted services to WikiLeaks after it published the first installment of about 250,000 classified communications between the US State Department and embassies around the world.

The organization's website, WikiLeaks.org, was down on Friday afternoon (PST).