Twitter has been in the news lately and for all the wrong reasons. The company has been going through a bit of turmoil as Elon Musk attempts to navigate through the various issues to prevent a total meltdown.
Now, a report from Platformer (Paywall) claims that Twitter is behind on its Google Cloud payments and could lose access to Google Cloud services on June 30. According to the sources, Google and Twitter had been engaged in a tug of war over payments for a while with Twitter asking Google to negotiate a better Google Cloud contract.
In case you are unaware, Google and Twitter had signed a multi-year contract in 2018, well before Musk took over. The deal included Twitter spending $1 Billion over the course of five years, including over $300 million in 2023. However, at some point during this year, Twitter stopped paying Google and the company is now planning to move away from Google altogether.
However, the plan to move away from Google is not going as expected and is behind schedule. According to the report, Smyte, an anti-harassment company that Twitter bought in 2018 is currently running on Google Cloud and will go offline on June 30. Not only that, but Google currently hosts Twitter services related to anti-spam, removing child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and protecting accounts. These too, could be shut down unless Twitter moves them to its own servers before June 30.
If Smyte goes down, it will likely reduce Twitter’s ability to achieve two of Musk’s stated priorities: removing CSAM and bots.
— Zoë Schiffer (@ZoeSchiffer) June 10, 2023
Google is not the only company struggling to get its invoices cleared. Earlier this year, Amazon threatened to stop paying for advertising to Twitter unless the company cleared its outstanding Amazon Web Services (AWS) bill. Twitter has also received a series of legal notices over not paying its rental and vendor bills.
Recently, Fidelity released a report noting that Twitter is now worth around $15 Billion, one-third of what Elon Musk paid last year to buy the company.
Twitter has seen a huge turmoil since its acquisition by billionaire Elon Musk late last year. With the company facing lawsuits from former employees, advertisers leaving the platform, security breach that allowed everyone to see Twitter Circle tweets, and multiple outages, it has been a rocky ride for Musk's latest experiment.
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