A federal judge in Washington ordered Microsoft on Thursday to halt all work on a $10 billion cloud-computing contract for the Pentagon, in a victory for Amazon, which had challenged the awarding of the contract.
In a sealed opinion, the judge, Patricia E. Campbell-Smith of the Court of Federal Claims, ordered work to stop on the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure project, known as JEDI, until Amazon’s legal challenge was resolved. The 10-year contract was one of the largest tech contracts from the Pentagon.
The decision adds to the acrimony surrounding the lucrative deal, which had set off a showdown among Amazon, Microsoft and other technology companies for the right to transform the military’s cloud-computing systems. Amazon, which is considered the largest provider of such technology, had been seen as a front-runner to win the contract.
But in October, the Department of Defense awarded the deal to Microsoft. Amazon protested and said the awarding of the deal had been unfair.
The internet giant claimed that President Donald Trump had interfered in the bidding process for the contract because of his feud with Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive and owner of The Washington Post. The Post has aggressively covered the Trump administration, and the president has referred to the newspaper as the “Amazon Washington Post” and accused it of spreading “fake news.”