Twitter has reportedly refused to pay its Google Cloud contract – By Igor Bonifacic (Engadget) / June 11, 2023
The decision could impact the company’s automated moderation system.
More platform instability could be in Twitter’s near future. In 2018, Twitter signed a $1 billion contract with Google to host some of its services on the company’s Google Cloud servers. Platformer reports Twitter recently refused to pay the search giant ahead of the contract’s June 30th renewal date. Twitter is reportedly rushing to move as many services off of Google’s infrastructure before the contract expires, but the effort is “running behind schedule,” putting some tools, including Smyte, a platform the company acquired in 2018 to bolster its moderation capabilities, in danger of going offline.
If Twitter can’t migrate the system to its own servers before the end of the month, Platformer suggests a shutdown would greatly impact the company’s ability to combat spam and child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Before Saturday, Smyte had been already showing signs of strain, following Elon Musk’s deep cuts to Twitter’s workforce. In December, Musk reportedly asked Twitter’s trust and safety team why the automated system hadn’t caught a Twitter Blue user who had been impersonating him to pump a crypto scam. The team told Musk the system had been unstable for a week, crashing “at least once a day.”
Platform instability has been a hallmark of Twitter 2.0. In February, many of the platform’s core features went down on more than one occasion. More recently, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had trouble announcing his bid for the Republican presidential nomination after Twitter Spaces could not handle the influx of people who wanted to listen to the broadcast. If Twitter is in fact planning to stiff Google, it wouldn’t be the first time the company has ghosted on a contract. At the end of last year, California Property Trust, the owner of the building that houses Twitter headquarters, sued the company for failing to pay rent.
