Elon Musk’s Twitter is reportedly coming under fire from Amazon for refusing to pay its $70 million bill for cloud servicess despite relying on Amazon Web Services for major parts of Twitter’s operations. Amazon is reportedly threatening to withhold advertising revenues from Musk’s platform in response.
A report from the Information states that Elon Musk’s Twitter has been refusing to pay its bills to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for several months now, despite relying on the cloud service for critical aspects of the social media platform. According to the tech outlet, AWS won’t renegotiate the five-and-a-half-year contract it signed with Twitter in 2020, leaving an unpaid balance of at least $70 million.
Twitter agreed to pay $510 million over the course of the agreement, and it was anticipated that Twitter would transfer its primary hosting to AWS. But since Twitter now makes greater use of Google Cloud, this never happened. Twitter’s $1 billion, five-year contract with Google is currently still active, despite the company’s efforts to cut costs associated with its Google Cloud usage.
AWS reportedly threatened retaliation by stating that it would not pay for the advertising it runs on Twitter due to the non-payment of bills. It is anticipated that this would cost Twitter around $1 million in advertising revenue in the first quarter, and more when Amazon Studios is included. Twitter recently paid $10 million in AWS costs, but the company still owes a large amount.
Since Elon Musk bought Twitter, there have been a number of significant outages. Musk has cut back on server capacity, closed one of Twitter’s three U.S. data centers, and fired IT and software staff who kept the service operational. According to reports, this has seriously disrupted the platform, and many users are dissatisfied with the persistent problems.
The company’s relationship with AWS is likely to suffer significantly due to Twitter’s failure to pay its bills. The fact that AWS is refusing to renegotiate its contract is a sign that the company is taking the situation seriously. This could result in legal action, which might be expensive for Twitter.
Twitter has come under fire for its handling of data privacy and security issues in the past. The platform has previously been the target of several high-profile hacks, including a significant breach in 2020 that resulted in the accounts of several well-known people being compromised.
Read more at the Information here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan
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