In a recent turn of events, Twitter refused to pay its Google Cloud bills. The contract is nearing its renewal this month, and such a refusal can put the trust and safety of the microblogging platform at risk, as reported by Platformer on Saturday. Reportedly, last year, prior to Elon Musk’s takeover, the two companies signed a partnership in order to stand against spam and protect the accounts, among other things.
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In February 2021, Twitter and Google Cloud signed a multiyear contract. The expanded agreement envisions moving the offline analytics, data processing, and machine learning workloads of Twitter to Google’s Data Cloud. The microblogging site experiences trillions of events, processes uncountable petabytes of data, and runs an enormous number of jobs over a dozen clusters each day. Such a partnership allowed the social-media giant to utilise the company’s data cloud, including BigQuery, dataflow, BigTable, and machine learning (ML) tools. This allowed the microblogging site to make more sense with an improvement in how the site’s features were being used.
Former CTO of Twitter, Parag Agarwal, said in a statement, “Our initial partnership with Google Cloud has been successful and enabled us to enhance the productivity of our engineering teams.” Further, he added, “Building on this relationship and Google’s technologies will allow us to learn more from our data, move faster, and serve more relevant content to the people who use our service every day.”
According to the report by platformer, other details in relation to how such a disruption is going to affect the safety and security of Twitter were absent. The report suggested that Twitter has been trying to renegotiate the contract with Google since March. Further, reportedly, in the same month, Amazon warned Twitter about pulling out the advertising payments because of the latter’s uncleared bills from Amazon Web Services for utilising the cloud computing services.
Since Musk’s takeover, the microblogging site has been cutting significant costs and laying off thousands of employees. Reports suggest that the CEO of Twitter had directed Twitter Inc.’s teams to cut the infrastructural cost by $1 billion. Further, reportedly, the company was finding a way to save between $1.5 million and $3 million a day by cutting costs from servers and cloud services. According to an internal document that was reviewed by Reuters, Twitter was losing around $3 million a day because of all its spending.
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Such infrastructural cuts could put the Twitter website and app in jeopardy and at risk of going down during events where an unprecedented number of users rush to the site to share and consume information, like during any political crisis.
According to Reuters, neither Twitter nor Google responded to them in regards to the non-clearance of the Google Cloud Services bill.
