Zappos hit by massive data breach

Amazon-owned online retailer Zappos is occasionally known as a bit of a basket case in the customer experience industry as many do not think that their model of hugely personalised customer service is scaleable to larger e-commerce operations, despite their ownership.

The company's notoriously hugely loyal customers are feeling less so though as a result of a massive data breach which has exposed the details of as many as 24 million customers - including names, addresses, e-mail addresses, phone numbers and password hashes.

Whilst Zappos has stressed that credit card details were not exposed, plenty enough information was affected for large volumes of identity theft attempts to be undertaken that may result in them being exposed by activities such as phishing by the bad guys.

Hackers got into the company's internal network via one of their servers in Kentucky and they have had to suspend telephone based support in order to deal with the vast wave of furious customers.

Amazon purchased Zappos for USD$850m in 2009.