Microsoft stock fell today on news that a judge ordered a temporary block on the JEDI cloud contract in reaction to a lawsuit filed by Amazon. MSFT is down nearly 0.6% on the news.
A court notice promulgating the injunction was filed on Thursday, but wasn’t public. As of yet it is nebulous asto why the documents were sealed, and representatives from Microsoft and Amazon weren’t immediately available for comment.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is required to pay $42 million for any “costs and damages” that could be incurred in the event that the “injunction was issued wrongfully,” the filing states. Amazon must also file a notice showing that it has secured the necessary $42 million on or before Feb. 20.
Amazon has been protesting the award of the cloud contract to Microsoft in October, saying that it was driven partly by President Trump’s bias against the company. Trump often criticizes Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, claiming that the newspaper unfairly covers his administration.
In December, Amazon said President Trump engineered “behind-the-scenes attacks” against the company, which led to the e-commerce and cloud computing company missing out on a major contract for cloud services.
Now the company’s top spokesperson, Jay Carney, said Wednesday that Amazon wants President Donald Trump to disclose his involvement in a $10 billion cloud contract to make sure the process was “free of political interference.”
“All we’re trying to do through this protest and this request for a legal review is to ensure that a proper decision was made on behalf of U.S. taxpayers,” Carney, a former press secretary for President Barack Obama, told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Wednesday when asked about Amazon’s move to depose Trump.
“It’s about ensuring that the government, the Department of Defense, is free of political interference in these kinds of political decisions that affect the capabilities of our armed services,” he said.
In a heavily redacted, 103-page document made public last year, Amazon Web Services described why it’s protesting the Department of Defense’s decision to award Microsoft the JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure) contract. AWS claims it didn’t earn the JEDI contract, which could be worth as much as $10 billion, on account of President Donald Trump’s continuous public and private attacks against Amazon and, more directly, toward its CEO Jeff Bezos.