Per reporting in Platformer, Twitter has refused to pay its Google Cloud bills as its contract comes up for renewal this month. Before Musk bought Twitter last year, the company signed a multi-year contract with Google to host services related to fighting spam, removing child sexual abuse material, and protecting accounts, among other things. Twitter has been trying to renegotiate its contract, and this is that service bundle.
Also, in the cloud sales department, quoting from the Information, Amazon Web Services has suddenly cut ties with a key firm that earns commissions for bringing new customers to AWS, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation. The firm, Philadelphia-based Triumph Tech, was among a select number of “premier tier” partners, AWS’s highest designation for partners. The reason for the split couldn’t immediately be learned. In interviews, one current Triumph employee and one recently departed employee said they were concerned that the firm was giving overly aggressive estimates to AWS about how much business new customers would generate and that doing so could land Triumph in trouble with the cloud provider.
I’m pro cloud. But I do want to acknowledge that part of a cloud engagement is the potential for a customer to refuse your bill. Or if your cloud provider cuts service off, goes out of business, or even has an outage. This is planning and procedure, not anything more complicated. This is just a pair of real-life, high-stakes examples. Those Twitter services they refuse to pay for seem important.