Social-media service Parler vanished just before midnight Sunday Pacific time, when Amazon.com Inc. followed through on its threat to stop hosting the public-messaging platform that has exploded in popularity among supporters of President Trump.
The effective disappearance of Parler shows the growing breadth and effect of efforts by big technology companies to restrict content they label as dangerous after last week’s mob attack on the U.S. Capitol. Amazon had said in a letter to Parler over the weekend that it had seen a steady increase in violent content on the site and said Parler’s efforts to remove it were inadequate.
Parler’s effective disappearance came shortly after Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google removed the Parler app for mobile devices from their app stores—making it difficult for new users to download—without shutting down the service. Amazon’s move had a far more severe impact because it provides the back-end servers that host Parler’s website and databases, as it does for a large array of other prominent companies.
Parler Chief Executive John Matze didn’t respond to an email sent to his parler.com email address, or to a message sent via his LinkedIn profile. But he said in a post on Parler on Saturday that it was possible the service would be unavailable for as long as a week while it found new hosting services.
“This was a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the marketplace,” Mr. Matze wrote.
