Dive Brief:

• Amazon reportedly alerted some of its customers to a security breach impacting their email addresses and names, TechCrunch and other news outlets reported last week.

• Amazon declined further comment to Retail Dive, but told TechCrunch, "We have fixed the issue and informed customers who may have been impacted."

• The e-commerce giant has not revealed the extent of the breach or any details, according to the report.

Dive Insight:

Amazon may be especially tight-lipped about this breach because of its timing, just ahead of the unofficial launch of the holiday shopping season.

The news is nevertheless likely to affect sales, especially in light of escalating competition online from Target, Walmart and Best Buy, according to Carl Wright, chief commercial officer of cybersecurity platform AttackIQ.

Amazon is as much a tech business as a retail one, and stories about data insecurity are rare for the company — which also runs AWS, the cloud service that runs much of the internet. Still, it's apparently not immune.

Retailers lead the way in data breaches despite heavy spending on cybersecurity, according to the 2018 Thales Data Threat Report, Retail Edition. That may be why consumers in general have little faith in retailers, which they believe are least prepared to address a breach yet are most likely to experience one, according to research from payments tech company First Data.

The news follows a report earlier this month that Nordstrom employees' personal information was "improperly handled" by a contract worker last month. No customer data was involved in the department store's breach, and an investigation is ongoing.

In addition to its data breach — and its reticence to provide details on it — Amazon grabbed headlines over the weekend for Black Friday labor strikes in Spain, Italy, Germany and the UK, amid worker demands for better pay and greater safety. The effort continued to gain press attention over the weekend, with help from the social media hashtag #AmazonWeAreNotRobots.