The Justice Department says Apple is to blame for Microsoft and Amazon’s phone crashes

• Apple is facing an antitrust lawsuit from the U.S. Department of Justice.

• The lawsuit claims that Apple’s tactics have limited the success of other smartphone companies.

• Apple officials said the company plans to “vigorously defend” against the lawsuit.

US Justice Department blames Apple for Amazon and Microsoft phone outages.

On Thursday, Apple faced a brutal antitrust lawsuit that accused the major technology company of taking illegal anti-competitive actions in the smartphone market in order to achieve a dominant position for the iPhone.

The Justice Department and attorneys general from 16 states say the focus on the iPhone is driven by the ways Apple limits the functionality of other products and services to iPhone users.

Prosecutors said in the lawsuit: “Many prominent, well-financed companies have tried and failed to enter their respective markets because of these barriers to entry.”

The Justice Department cited previous smartphone failures, including the 2014 Fire cell phone from Amazon, HTC, LG and Microsoft’s mobile company.

In 2014, Time reported that the Fire Phone went up in flames in just over a year, forcing the company to incur a $170 million impairment charge and leaving Amazon with $83 million worth of unsold Fire Phones still in stock, it reported Time in 2014.

In the lawsuit, the Justice Department said Samsung and Google remain the only “significant competitors in the U.S. high-performance smartphone market.”

“The barriers are so high that Google ranks a distant third after Apple and Samsung, even though Google controls the development of the Android operating system,” the lawsuit says.

The Justice Department compared the legal action to the antitrust lawsuit filed against Microsoft in 1998.

The department accused Apple of using “many of the same tactics as Microsoft,” including “higher prices, fewer new products and a worse user experience.”

In a statement shared with Business Insider, an Apple representative said that if the lawsuit is successful, “it will make it harder for us to build the technology people expect from Apple — where hardware, software, and services intersect.”

The company also said that if successful, the lawsuit “would set a dangerous precedent authorizing government to take a decisive role in designing technology for people. We believe this lawsuit is flawed in fact and law, and we will vigorously defend against it.”

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