It was only a matter of time! A federal judge has temporarily blocked the JEDI contract that Microsoft signed with Pentagon last year, in response to a lawsuit filed by Amazon.
The cloud leader filed a motion last month asking the court to pause Microsoft’s work on this $10 billion contract called the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure that was awarded to the Redmond based technology titan in October.
Shares of Microsoft fell on the news, while Amazon stock also took slight tumble.
According to the details we have on the matter, a court notice announcing the injunction was filed on Thursday, but the document were not made public for some reason.
In the words of Frank Shaw, the corporate vice president of communications at Microsoft:
“While we are disappointed with the additional delay we believe that we will ultimately be able to move forward with the work to make sure those who serve our country can access the new technology they urgently require. We have confidence in the Department of Defense, and we believe the facts will show they ran a detailed, thorough and fair process in determining the needs of the warfighter were best met by Microsoft.”
No comment from other parties yet.
The JEDI cloud computing contract is intended to modernize the IT operations at Pentagon, and could be worth this amount over the course of 10 years.
But it was last month that Amazon filed a formal motion via its cloud computing arm AWS, claiming that the evaluation process included clear deficiencies, errors, and unmistakable bias.
The company also protested the move saying it was driven by the bias President Trump has against Amazon. It is, after all, headed by CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, a newspaper that he believes unfairly covers his administration.
This is just getting stated, folks!
