#Parler app pulled offline as CEO warns of ‘longer than expected’ outage

Parler went offline early Monday after Amazon booted the controversial social network from its servers — and it might not be back soon.

Parler’s official website was inaccessible Monday morning after Amazon Web Services said it would stop supporting the fledgling company’s operations because of the violent content that proliferated on the platform.

Apple and Google also pulled Parler’s app from their respective stores this weekend over similar concerns. Users who still had the app downloaded on their smartphones were unable to load pages on Monday, according to The Verge.

Parler CEO John Matze initially said the site would be offline for “up to a week” as the company searched for a new web host. But he gave a less rosy outlook Monday, saying the tech titans’ crackdown was discouraging other companies from working with Parler.

“We will likely be down longer than expected,” Matze reportedly wrote on his Parler profile. “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.”

Parler attracted supporters of President Trump and other right-wing activists with its pledge to be a haven for free speech as larger platforms such as Facebook and Twitter clamped down on misinformation after the 2020 presidential election.

But users reportedly took advantage of the site’s laissez-faire policies to post threats of violence before Trump supporters laid siege on the Capitol on Wednesday. Amazon Web Services pointed to 98 Parler posts that incited and encouraged violence, including threats against “liberal leaders” and “dirty left demonrats [sic],” BuzzFeed News reported.

“It’s clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service,” the company reportedly wrote in a letter to Parler. “[W]e cannot provide services to a customer that is unable to effectively identify and remove content that encourages or incites violence against others.”

Google, Apple and Amazon cracked down on Parler as Twitter permanently suspended Trump from its platform, saying his account posed a “risk of further incitement of violence” after the president incited the deadly Capitol riots.

Amazon Web Services similarly stopped hosting a website associated with Gab — another alternative social network that’s drawn scrutiny for allowing hateful content — in 2019, according to BuzzFeed News.

Gab’s main site remained online, and it saw 600,000 new users join on Sunday amid the crackdown on Parler, according to a post from CEO Andrew Torba.