A federal judge on Thursday issued an order temporarily blocking the US military from awarding a multibillion-dollar cloud computing contract to Microsoft after Amazon claimed the process was tainted by politics.

A temporary injunction requested by Amazon was issued US judge Patricia Campbell-Smith, barring the Department of Defense from starting work on the contract known as JEDI, according to a summary of the ruling available online.

Details of the ruling were sealed for unspecified reasons.

Amazon has alleged it was shut out of the deal because of President Donald Trump’s vendetta and is seeking testimony from the president and other top officials on the reasons for awarding the $10 billion US military cloud computing contract.

AFP