Twitter is facing another lawsuit after the company was accused of failing to pay for services for offices in London, Dublin, Sydney and Singapore.
Sydney-based infrastructure company Facilitate is seeking a collective payment over A$1m ($666,000) across the three businesses in alleged owed payments dating back to October last year, when Elon Musk bought Twitter.
Facilitate provided sensor installation in London and Dublin and an office fit-out in Singapore, while in Australia, Facilitate decommissioned Twitter’s Sydney office and temporarily stored its contents, according to case documents obtained by the Guardian.
The company claims it is owed £203,115, SGD$546,596, and A$61,318, respectively.
The case, filed in the US district court of Northern California at the end of June, was first reported by NCA Newswire.
The firm says that after Musk took over Twitter, the social media company did not dispute the invoices but has simply not paid them. Facilitate is seeking damages and costs.
Twitter has not yet filed a defence.
Facilitate notes in the court filings that it is not the sole company suing Twitter since Musk took over. The firm said Musk’s moderation decisions and the unbanning of far right and neo-Nazi accounts had alienated advertisers and caused a financial crisis for the company.
“Twitter responded with a campaign of extreme belt-tightening that amounted to requiring nearly everyone to whom it owes money to sue,” the firm said.
“Twitter stopped paying rent on some of its offices and stopped paying several vendors whose services it was still using. Twitter also cancelled many contracts and stopped paying people to whom it owes money.”
Twitter has already faced lawsuits over its alleged failure to pay rent on offices across the globe.
There has also been speculation that the company’s decision to limit users who weren’t paying for the service to seeing just 600 posts a day last week was a result of Twitter failing to pay the bills for services to keep the site up and running smoothly. Musk says the limit is to prevent data scraping.
As part of the massive layoffs at Twitter after Musk’s takeover late last year, the company no longer has a press department. A request for comment on the case sent to the former contact email received a poop emoji as the auto-reply.
