Judge: Microsoft must suspend work for US Department of JEDI cloud contract

A US judge ordered Microsoft to stop preparatory work for the JEDI project by order of competitor Amazon. That’s a billion-dollar deal for a cloud contract with the US Department of Defense.

Amazon must pay $42 million in case the judge later rules that Microsoft wrongly had to stop work on the JEDI project, reports The New York Times. The court decision is not yet public. Amazon has won a small victory with the ruling.

The US Department of Defense awarded the multi-billion dollar contract to Microsoft, but Amazon disagreed with the decision from the start. US President Donald Trump has repeatedly spoken out against Amazon, which many experts believed would win the contract. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos also owns The Washington Post, a newspaper that has often spoken out against Trump.

The US Department of Defense claims that it has not harmed any company and that the process went smoothly. Microsoft is also confident. “We believe the facts will show that the Department of Defense went through a detailed, thorough and fair process to conclude that Microsoft best met its needs.”

The JEDI project, or the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure Cloud, is intended, among other things, to give the US military better access to defense data on battlefields and other remote areas.