A recent report by The Wall Street Journal has revealed that Twitter is in a dispute with Google over its cloud computing bill, which amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars per year. According to the report, Twitter is refusing to pay the full amount that Google is charging, claiming that the service is unreliable and overpriced.
The report cites anonymous sources familiar with the matter, who say that Twitter has been unhappy with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) since it migrated most of its infrastructure from Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2018. The sources say that Twitter has experienced frequent outages, slow performance, and security issues on GCP, and that it believes Google is charging too much for the service.
Twitter is reportedly seeking to renegotiate its contract with Google, which expired in June 2023, or to switch back to AWS or another cloud provider. However, Google is not willing to lower its prices or offer any concessions and is threatening to take legal action if Twitter does not pay its bill. Just yesterday, Twitter users experienced a rate limit error while trying to navigate through the bird app, with Elon Musk tweeting about the glitch as mere systemic push on curtailing information scalping on the platform which many presume as a shift to make users subscribe on twitter blue subscription.
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Sources told Bloomberg that Google had initially struggled to communicate with Musk to discuss the unpaid bills and had tried to reach him by contacting staff at SpaceX instead. Yaccarino, who became CEO of the company in early June, helped to restore the relationship and held talks with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, a person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. They said that Musk was supportive of the changed relationship.
The report also claims that Twitter’s decision to ban former President Donald Trump from its platform in January has added to the tension between the two companies, as Google was unhappy with Twitter’s handling of the situation and its impact on free speech.
The companies are also negotiating a broader partnership that could include Google’s advertising spending on Twitter and its use of Twitter’s API, the person added. Twitter typically pays between $200 million and $300 million a year for Cloud services from Google, sources told Bloomberg.
Google did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment, while Twitter replied with its standard automatic response, which did not address Insider’s query. Since Musk bought Twitter in October, he’s claimed that the social-media company had been on the path to bankruptcy and has drastically pulled back on spending. He chopped Twitter’s workforce in half the week after he took charge and has been incrementally laying off other staff ever since.
Neither Twitter nor Google has commented publicly on the report, but both companies have acknowledged that they have a partnership on cloud computing. In a statement to The Wall Street Journal, a Twitter spokesperson said: “We have a multi-year partnership with Google Cloud and are happy with the relationship and the results we’ve seen.” A Google spokesperson said: “We’re proud to work with Twitter and look forward to continuing our partnership.”