Parler is now offline after Amazon severed ties, and its CEO said it could be down for a week at least
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- Social media app Parler is now offline.
- Amazon booted the app off its web-hosting servers after it said Parler failed to moderate threats of violence.
- Parler CEO John Matze said the site could be down for up to a week.
- Apple and Google have both removed the app from their app stores.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Parler, the social media app popular with supporters of President Donald Trump, is now offline after Amazon booted the platform from its web-hosting service.
Amazon announced its intention to sever ties with Parler on Sunday, saying it "cannot provide services to a customer that is unable to effectively identify and remove content that encourages or incites violence against others."
"Because Parler cannot comply with our terms of service and poses a very real risk to public safety, we plan to suspend Parler's account effective Sunday, January 10th, at 11:59PM PST," a spokesperson said in an emailed statement to Insider.
Parler CEO John Matze told Fox News on Sunday that the platform would "get back online as quickly as possible," and that the site could be down for up to a week. In a later post on Parler reported by Newsweek Matze said it would "likely be down longer than expected."
"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," Matze wrote.
Apple and Google both removed the Parler app from their app stores last week. Apple said it was because Parler had failed to regulate "threats of violence and illegal activity" on its platform, and Google gave a similar line of reasoning.
Apple and Google's suspensions came after the app experienced a surge in popularity on Friday, the same day Twitter permanently suspended President Donald Trump's account. The app was briefly at the top of Apple's App Store, and according to data from app analytics firm Sensor Tower it saw 210,000 downloads on Friday, up 281% from the day before.
Numerous conservative figures and personalities including lawmakers also announced they're moving to Parler following Twitter's suspension of Trump. Gab, another social media site famous for appealing to the right-wing, said on Saturday it was gaining 100,000 users per hour.
Experts previously told Insider that Parler is likely to survive being booted off Amazon's services. "It is realistic to expect that Parler will find another provider to host their services like AWS [Amazon Web Services]," said Max Aliapoulios, a computer science Ph. D candidate at New York University.