Featured in this episode of Chaos Lever
Elon Musk, the bastion of fiscal integrity that he is, apparently has chosen yet another controversial and poorly planned out cost-savings strategy: not paying his AWS bill.
Back in 2020, Twitter signed a five year contract with AWS. The goal was to move a significant amount of services over to AWS from their own hosted environment. While a good amount of Twitter does in fact run on AWS, a lot of those migrations never happened for totally unexplainable reasons.
So Musk, in his infinite wisdom, decided if he wasn’t using the services, then he wasn’t gonna pay the bill. That’s uh, NOT how contracts work, bubbie.
AWS’s first retaliation was to stop paying their own bill to Twitter owed for AWS and Amazon Studios ads I’m sure you’ve encountered. It will be fun to see how this plays out- AWS has indicated that they have no interest whatsoever in renegotiating their contract with Twitter, and thanks to Musk, Twitter doesn’t have anything close to the engineering resources to migrate off of AWS anyway.
According to reports, Twitter is still $70 million behind on payments. It’s all fun and games until AWS just, like, turns off Twitter. Which they can and absolutely will.