The social media platform Upstart Parler had restricted access to its own proprietary code in an attempt to block continued software development, CEO John Matze told “Life, Liberty & Levin” in an interview on Sunday night.
Parler was kicked out of Google Play and the Apple App Store after the January 6 deadly riot on the United States Capitol. Soon after, Amazon Web Services disconnected Parler from its servers only 24 hours in advance. Parler is suing Amazon in federal court.
PARLER CEO: NO INDICATIONS OF GREAT TECHNOLOGY CLOSING THREATS WERE ‘DEADLY SERIOUS’ UNTIL THE LAST MINUTE
“We are trying to get our services back up and running so that we can at least access our code repositories, at least we can access our development and testing environment,” Matze told presenter Mark Levin.
“You know, this is an indication to me that it seems very strange if they believed that social media itself was a problem, because they shut down everything else too,” added Matze. “They blocked our ability to work and even access our own code and work on it.”
Matze explained that he received “a very small window to download everything while we were, you know, experiencing great growth. And then we tried to download what we could, but now we no longer have access.”
Amazon said it repeatedly told Parler that the site’s content violated the two companies’ agreement. The suspension was a “last resort” to block access to violent content, said Amazon Web Services in response to the Parler lawsuit, “including plans for violence to halt the impending presidential transition.”
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APPLICATION
Parler is seeking a temporary restraining order to prevent Amazon Web Services from denying Parler. He claims that AWS is violating the Sherman Antitrust Act in the process, pointing out that AWS has an agreement with competitor Twitter. Amazon said Parler has demonstrated “unwillingness and inability” to remove violent content from its website.
Matze said that his company needs “to be able to activate our servers so that we can get some information that requires our servers to be running”, but that “they are preventing us from doing that right now”.
Charles Creitz of Fox News contributed to this report.