The firm claimed that after Musk took over Twitter, the micro-blogging platform did not dispute the invoices but instead chose not to pay them. Facilitate is seeking costs and damages…reports Asian Lite News
Elon Musk-owned Twitter is facing a lawsuit after being accused of failing to pay for services for offices located in London, Dublin, Sydney and Singapore.
A Sydney-based infrastructure company Facilitate is seeking more than A$1 million in payments across the three businesses for alleged owed payments that date back to October of last year, when Elon Musk acquired Twitter, The Guardian reported.
According to case documents, Facilitate offered sensor installation in Twitter’s London and Dublin offices and an office fit-out in Singapore. Also, the infrastructure company decommissioned Twitter’s Sydney office in Australia and temporarily stored its contents.
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“The company claims it is owed £203,115, SGD$546,596, and A$61,318, respectively,” the report said.
The case, filed in the US district court of Northern California at the end of last month, was first reported by NCA Newswire.
The firm claimed that after Musk took over Twitter, the micro-blogging platform did not dispute the invoices but instead chose not to pay them. Facilitate is seeking costs and damages.
Twitter has not yet submitted a defence filing, the report said.
In court filings, Facilitate stated that it is not the sole company suing Twitter since Musk took control.
According to the firm, Musk’s moderation decisions, including the unbanning of far-right and neo-Nazi accounts, led to advertiser alienation and caused a financial crisis for the company.
“Twitter responded with a campaign of extreme belt-tightening that amounted to requiring nearly everyone to whom it owes money to sue,” the firm said.
“Twitter stopped paying rent on some of its offices and stopped paying several vendors whose services it was still using. Twitter also cancelled many contracts and stopped paying people to whom it owes money.”
Meanwhile, last month, reports had surfaced that the micro-blogging platform refused to pay Google Cloud bills as its contract came up for renewal in June.
However, later, Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino settled the strained ties with Google Cloud over non-payments of its bills before the June 30 contract deadline.
Twitter’s recent changes
Twitter’s recent changes have affected Google’s ability to display tweets and Twitter pages in search results.
“We’re aware that our ability to crawl Twitter.com has been limited, affecting our ability to display tweets and pages from the site in search results,” Google spokesperson Lara Levin said in a statement to The Verge.
“Websites have control over whether crawlers can access their content.”
Twitter recently made some significant changes to the visibility of tweets on the platform.
Last week, the platform blocked unregistered users from being able to browse tweets. Later, it introduced “temporary” limits for the number of tweets people can read per day.
Levin’s statement suggests that the modifications have affected how Google crawls Twitter.
When Search Engine Land compared the number of Twitter URLs that Google had indexed between Friday and Monday, the statistics clearly indicated that something was wrong.
Friday last week, Google had indexed 471 million results for “site: twitter.com,” but on Monday, that number was down to just 180 million.
“Given Twitter’s rate limits on tweets are supposed to be temporary, there’s a chance that if those lift, we might see the usual amount of tweets in Google search results in the future,” the report said.
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