Parler Site Offline After AWS Pulls Hosting

Niluksi Koswanage and Amy Thomson (Bloomberg) -- Parler was taken offline early Monday morning after large tech companies including Amazon.com Inc. and Google withdrew their support of the social networking site in the wake of violence and rioting at the U.S. Capitol last week

Parler Chief Executive Officer John Matze said the company had sought alternatives after it was notified by Amazon it would terminate its cloud computing support at midnight Sunday in California. Parler hasn’t been able to find other suppliers willing to step in because of the negative publicity stemming from the violence, organized in part on its own platform.

“We will likely be down longer than expected,” Matze wrote in a post on his network before Amazon restricted hosting. “This is not due to software restrictions — we have our software and everyone’s data ready to go. Rather it’s that Amazon’s, Google’s and Apple’s statements to the press about dropping our access has caused most of our other vendors to drop their support for us as well. And most people with enough servers to host us have shut their doors to us. We will update everyone and update the press when we are back online.”

In the wake of last week’s riots, Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc. banished President Donald Trump, as well as users and groups supporting the violence. That led to a surge in downloads for the less restrictive Parler service, in part because of encouragement from Republican lawmakers and media figures.

But Google and Apple Inc. banned the service from their mobile app stores, blocking Android and iPhone users from downloading it from their outlets. Matze insisted he would not cave in to “politically motivated companies and those authoritarians who hate free speech!”

In his latest post, Matze vowed he wouldn’t move to another social media site.

“Parler is my final stand on the Internet,” he wrote. “I won’t be making an account on any social. Parler is my home.”