Parler, a social media platform that many right-leaning voices have been using since its founding in 2018, went dark early Monday morning as Amazon banned the site from its cloud hosting service.
CEO John Matze told Fox News that the site will try to “get back online as quickly as possible,” but warned that the platform could be down for as long as a week.
“Amazon suspended Parler from its Amazon Web Services (AWS) unit, for violating AWS’s terms of services by failing to effectively deal with a steady increase in violent content, according to an email by an AWS Trust and Safety team to Parler, seen by Reuters,” the news agency reported. “An Amazon spokesperson confirmed the letter was authentic.”
Amazon said Parler presented a “very real risk to public safety.”
Parler has been hit from all sides as top tech companies seek to shut it down. Google suspended the site from its app store Friday, saying Parler had failed to moderate “egregious content” posted by users.
Apple also removed the site from its app store.
“We have suspended Parler from the App Store until they resolve these issues,” Apple said in a statement Saturday. Apple had given Parler 24 hours to submit a detailed plan to moderate its content, claiming that users used the service to coordinate Wednesday’s riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Matze ripped Amazon, Google and Apple, saying the tech giants coordinated to shut down conservatives. Twitter last week permanently suspended President Trump from the platform, saying he had violated its terms.
“This was a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the market place… You can expect the war on competition and free speech to continue, but don’t count us out,” Matze said in a post on Parler. “There is the possibility Parler will be unavailable on internet for up to a week as we rebuild from scratch.”
On Fox News, Matze said Sunday — shortly before the site went dark — that the tech companies “all worked together to make sure at the same time we would lose access to, not only our apps, but they’re also shutting all of our servers off tonight, off the Internet. They made an attempt to not only kill the apps, but also destroy the entire company. And it’s not just these three companies, every vendor from text message services, to email providers, to our lawyers, all ditched us, too, on the same day.”
Meanwhile, another alternative social media site said its rolls are exploding.
The CEO of Gab claims it’s picking up 10,000 users an hour following Twitter banning Trump. “The traffic just keeps growing hang tight, even more servers on the way today,” Gab CEO Andrew Torba wrote on the site Saturday.
Related: Gab Picking Up 10,000 Users Per Hour, CEO Claims, After Trump’s Twitter Ban