Twitter Refuses to Pay Its Google Cloud Bills

As its contract is due for renewal this month, tech news outlet Platformer reports that Twitter is refusing to pay its Google Cloud bills.

While Twitter hosts some services on its proprietary servers, Platformer notes that “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.” This contract predates Elon Musk’s buyout of the social media platform.

Unless Twitter pays Google or the companies come up with a mutual solution, the heated conflict could put Twitter’s trust and safety teams at risk. Twitter will lose access to Google’s services if it doesn’t pay off the debt by June 30.

Twitter is refusing to honor the contract worth $1 billion dollars and is reportedly trying to negotiate the deal with Google “since at least March.”

Google is not the only company struggling to collect money from Twitter. A separate report from The Information revealed that a few months ago, Amazon warned Twitter that it would withhold advertising payments if Twitter didn’t pay for using Amazon’s cloud computing services. The move is possibly another one in the series of attempts for Twitter to cut costs.

Since Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in October 2022, the company reportedly cut infrastructure costs like cloud services by another $1 billion. It has also reduced costs in other areas of operation, including laying off thousands of employees.

Twitter seems to be on a rocky road lately. Internal documents revealed that the social media company’s ad revenue has gone down by more than half since Musk’s acquisition. Many advertisers cut ties with the platform over concerns related to the new leadership and the direction Twitter will take.

Musk assured investors in April that the company managed to repair its relationships with advertisers, bringing almost all of them back. Musk stepped down from the CEO role at Twitter and appointed Linda Yaccarino, former chair of advertising sales for NBCUniversal, on June 5.

According to investment firm Fidelity, the decision to replace Musk as CEO came after Twitter’s valuation dropped from $44 billion (the price Musk paid to acquire the company) to $15 billion after his acquisition,

Neither Twitter nor Google have commented on the topic.