Following Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter in Oct. 2022, the company has reportedly refused to pay its Amazon Web Services (AWS) bills over the last several months.
Twitter reportedly paid AWS $10M for cloud services, but the company still owes the cloud giant far more than that.
Based on a multi-year contract signed between the two companies in 2020, Twitter owes AWS at least $70M.
- Twitter has attempted to renegotiate the contract, which AWS refused. The social media company has also tried to renegotiate its contract with Google, which provides more cloud services for Twitter than AWS.
- Part of the issue with Amazon lies in that AWS contracts typically require a fixed spending amount regardless of the number of cloud services that are actually consumed. Musk sought to negotiate the price based on usage, which Amazon would only agree to if Twitter demonstrated that it would be a better customer in the long term.
- AWS is threatening to stop paying for its Twitter advertising as a form of retaliation. Amazon was expected to spend nearly $1M in ads displayed on the Twitter platform.
Since his $44B buyout of Twitter, Elon Musk has gone on a “cost-cutting spree,” trying to terminate or renegotiate multiple contracts with various companies and service providers, including Salesforce.
