A federal judge has sided with Amazon imposing a temporary injunction preventing Microsoft from working on the Pentagon’s JEDI contract.
Microsoft won the Pentagon’s coveted Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract in October 2019, pulling off what was seen as an upset against rival Amazon. Industry experts had believed Amazon was all but guaranteed to win the contract, given its long history of working with classified government data. In fact, it wasn’t until after Microsoft won the award that it was granted the Impact Level 6 clearance, allowing it to store sensitive data in the cloud, rather than air-gapped computers.
Following Microsoft’s win, Amazon immediately decried what it saw as bias and interference from President Trump. According to former Defense Secretary James Mattis’ biography, President Trump called him in 2018 and told him to “screw Amazon” over the JEDI contract.
Amazon almost immediately filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. In the meantime, it also filed for a temporary injunction to prevent Microsoft from working on the contract until the matter could be settled. With a judge now granting the injunction, it appears the JEDI saga is far from over.
