Parler CEO admits site may never recover from Amazon ban

Talk may never recover from the ban on Amazon and a number of other tech companies, CEO John Matze told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday.

“I’m optimistic,” he said at one point in the conversation. “It may take days, it may take weeks, but Talking will come back and when we do, we’ll be stronger.”

But at another point in the conversation, he admitted, “It could never be. We don’t know yet.”

Over the weekend, Google and Apple both pulled Talking from their app stores. Soon after, Amazon kicked out Talking from Amazon Web Services, which hosted the site. And it wasn’t just Amazon. “Every provider, from text messaging to email providers to our lawyers, have all abandoned us,” Matze said in an interview on Fox News Sunday. Talking has been offline since then.

Tech companies were worried because Parler had become a meeting place for the kind of right-wing extremists who were planning last week’s violent assault on the U.S. Capitol. Amazon says it warned Speak for months about the violent content hosted on the site – for example, content calling for “rape, torture and murder of public officials and private citizens.”

After Amazon started Talking Outside of AWS, Talking sued Amazon. Parler claims the pullout was part of an anti-competitive plot to bolster Twitter’s dominance. But as Amazon pointed out in its response, Amazon does not host the Twitter feed and the two companies did not communicate on Speak.

With multiple services dropping Speak simultaneously, it could take some time for the engineers at Parler to rebuild the service using different providers. Even if they can handle this, they will likely be blocked by bans from Apple and Google, as they will not have any easy way to distribute their mobile app to users.