Elon Musk’s Twitter Refuses To Pay Google Cloud Bills

Twitter has refused to settle its Google Cloud bills as the contract that the social media company has with Google nears renewal this month. The move could result in the trust and safety teams at the company being affected.

Twitter refuses to pay Google Cloud bills

A report by Platformer exposed the conflict between the two tech giants that could affect the trust and safety teams at Twitter. Twitter has its own servers that are used to host some services. The company has also worked with Amazon and Google to complement the infrastructure and boost the performance of these services.

Before Musk purchased Twitter in 2022, Twitter had signed a multi-year contract deal with Google. The deal was to have Google host services related to addressing span posts, censoring child sexual abuse material, and protecting user accounts, among others.

The report by Platformer did not share in-depth details about how a conflict between the two companies will affect the trust and safety teams at Twitter. However, the development comes at a time when Twitter, under Musk’s ownership, has been taking measures to drastically reduce costs.

Twitter’s efforts to cut costs

Following Musk’s acquisition of Twitter late last year, the company has been taking measures to cut costs dramatically, and it has also laid off thousands of employees. Some of the costs that Musk has ordered to be reduced include infrastructure costs like spending on cloud services. The social media company has trimmed infrastructure costs by $1 billion.

As part of this strategy, Twitter has been trying to renegotiate its contract with Google since at least March this year, according to an earlier report by The Information. The social media company has also delayed making payments to Amazon Web Services, with the latter threatening to withhold advertising payments.

In March this year, Amazon warned Twitter about the possible withholding of advertising payments because of the outstanding bills that the company owed Amazon Web Services for its cloud computing services. Twitter has yet to offer a statement on the outstanding bills to Google.

Smyte is a company that was acquitted by Twitter in 2018. The company provides the tools needed to stop abuse and harassment. It is also among the services that are currently available on the Google Cloud Platform.

The Managing Editor at the Platformer, Zoe Schiffer, tweeted about this development saying, “It is now scheduled to be shut down June 30, sources say. If Smyte goes down, it will likely reduce Twitter’s ability to achieve two of Musk’s stated priorities: removing CSAM and bots.”

Earlier this month, the head of trust and safety at Twitter, Ella Irwin, told Reuters that she had resigned from the social media company. Twitter has been facing criticism for the failure of robust protections against harmful content since Musk took over the social media platform. Irwin joined Twitter in June 2022, and she oversaw content moderation on the platform before her resignation.