Social medium Parler is offline after tech companies cut ties

Social medium Parler has been offline since Monday morning. Tech companies have cut ties with the company one by one in recent days. Now Amazon has discontinued AWS hosting, making the platform unreachable.

Statement CEO: we will be back online

Parler’s site is no longer available after Amazon previously said it would stop hosting the company’s services. Amazon wasn’t the first to take action; Google removed the company’s app from the Play Store just before the weekend, and Apple followed suit by removing Parler from the App Store as well.

The reason for the severing of ties is the content of posts on the social medium and lack of moderation. Business Insider cites an email from Amazon to Parler that the service had violated its terms of use. “Recently we have seen an increase in violent content on the site that violates the terms. It is clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms.”

In addition, Parler would have been hacked. As a result, hackers would have been given admin rights to retrieve all data and images from the site. Below that are photos of user identification. Parler CEO John Matze said in a now no longer accessible post on its own site that it could take up to a week to rebuild the service and put it online. It is unknown where the service will be hosted from then on. Parler is two years old. The American service existed as an alternative to existing social media such as Facebook and Twitter, where, according to the founders, users cannot say what they want without being punished. The site has seen a resurgence in popularity in the past week. It was related to the storming of the US Capitol.