Google Shuts Down Amazon Unionization Website (UPDATED)

For several months, a website hosted on a Google subdomain was posting workplace horror stories from people claiming to be Amazon employees. Now it's been shut down. Kelly O

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This post has been updated. Scroll to the bottom for more.

It appears that Google has disabled a website where people who claim to be Amazon employees were threatening to unionize. Google posted a notice saying the website violated its terms of service on Friday evening.

On Tuesday, we ran a story about the website, which was soliciting Amazon workplace horror stories to be published online. The site, which called itself the Former and Current Employees of Amazon (FACE of Amazon), had been up and running since late October.

Between October and early February, the site had received some 27,000 hits and 80 stories. In the three days after our story was published, FACE claims that it had received an additional 45,000 hits.

"Google shut off our site a few minutes ago without any explanation, so we're working to see if they will turn it back on based on our appealing their decision or else we will find an alternative location to host it," FACE told me in an e-mail. "We don't think it's a coincidence that they did this late on Friday afternoon."

We've reached out to Google and Amazon for comment and will update if we hear back.

A partial backup of the website is available through the Wayback Machine. You can read it here.

UPDATE (2/6/2016, 4:20 p.m.): Looks like the FACE of Amazon website has been restored. No word from Google or Amazon yet.

UPDATE (2/7/2016, 4:33 p.m.): Google tells us that the website was flagged by another user as spam. After Google manually reviewed the site and found this was not the case, they put it back online.