Seattle-area web services company Epik said it has not had communications with Parler, the social media platform in the spotlight following the riot at the U.S. Capitol last week.
Amazon Web Services said on Saturday that it would suspend Parler on Sunday before midnight, citing a violation of its terms of service due to calls for violence on the platform.
Getting booted from AWS would take Parler offline and means the site would need to find a new hosting service.
In a lengthy statement posted on Epik’s website, the company said “no communication has been received by them for discussion of future service provision.”
Epik, founded in 2009, has become known for hosting websites that were previously blocked off by other providers. In 2018, it hosted Gab.com, the site that was dropped by GoDaddy and other companies in the wake of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting.
Epik also temporarily helped 8chan get back online in 2019 after the site was tied to far-right extremism and connected to a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, but changed course two days later.
In its statement, Epik does not say whether it is open to working with Parler in the future. The company calls out the “staggering size of Twitter and Facebook” and said it has “closely observed the battle between oversized monopolies and smaller platforms.”
“The notion that Big Tech has pushed for centralized control over all future narratives is very real,” writes Robert Davis, senior vice president of communications.
Parler has become popular in recent months as an alternative to Facebook and Twitter, which both banned President Trump last week following the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday.
Apple and Google have removed Parler from their respective app stores over the past few days. Apple said it received complaints that Parler was used to plan and coordinate the Capitol riots, BuzzFeed reported.
Parler’s CEO said Sunday that other businesses have also stopped working with the social media company. Other large platforms such as Stripe and Snapchat have limited or restricted Trump-related accounts.
Epik was in the headlines this past October after GoDaddy and PayPal severed their ties to Epik.
The company is led by founder and CEO Robert Monster, a veteran tech exec who previously founded Global Market Insite, which was acquired in 2011 by Kantar.
In 2018, Monster defended the decision to host Gab.com in a blog post that included the line “de-platforming is digital censorship.”
“De-platforming a haven of free speech is not about left or right,” Monster wrote.
