Elon Musk is trying to get more favorable terms for Google servers by not paying Twitter‘s bills. Twitter CEO Elon Musk reportedly refuses to pay the company’s Google Cloud servers bill. As a result, some services could be shut down in early July because they lack the infrastructure to run them.
In 2018, Twitter negotiated a $1 billion deal with Google that allowed the company to use Google’s cloud infrastructure. The contract expires on June 30. Musk has not renewed it until now and has not paid some bills for the assurance still in effect, U.S. media Platformer reports.
Musk has reportedly been trying to negotiate better terms for the new contract since March 2023. He would use the non-payment of the bills as leverage against Google.
In addition, Musk has instructed Twitter techies* to pull as many services as possible from Google’s infrastructure before the contract expires. However, those efforts have “fallen behind schedule,” Platformer reports. As a result, some tools are in danger of going offline – including Smyte, a platform designed to improve the moderation of inappropriate content on Twitter.
According to Platformer, moving the service to its own servers by the end of the month could lead to some problems. The fight against spam and depictions of child abuse could be limited.
Smyte was already showing signs of overload after Musk slashed Twitter’s workforce in recent months. In December, Musk reportedly asked his security team why the system could not identify a “Twitter Blue” user posing as the Twitter CEO to carry out a crypto scam. In doing so, the team stated that the system was unstable and crashed “at least once a day.”
This is not Elon Musk’s first refusal to pay his bills. At the beginning of the year, it became known that the richest man in the world – Forbes estimates his fortune at 226 billion dollars – did not want to pay the rent for the Twitter offices. By the end of January, debts in the millions are said to have accumulated.