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Verizon is to shut down part of its public cloud service, according to an email sent to customers, with an analyst arguing the telco’s pushback comes as “no surprise”.

In the email to Verizon Cloud customers, as posted by Kenn White on Twitter, users of Verizon’s Public Cloud and Reserved Performance Cloud Spaces services will have to make other plans by April 12, when the virtual servers will be switched off. Users of the Verizon Virtual Private Cloud and Verizon Cloud Storage will not be affected by the move, while the Cloud Marketplace store, launched to great fanfare in 2014, will also close.

“Verizon is discontinuing its cloud service that accepts credit card payments on April 12,” a company statement read. “Verizon remains committed to delivering a range of cloud services for enterprise and government customers and is making significant investments in its cloud platform in 2016.”

Yet the move makes for interesting, if not particularly surprising, news for telcos trying to move in on the cloud infrastructure market, according to Synergy Research chief analyst John Dinsdale.

“Telcos generally are having to take a back seat on cloud and especially on public cloud services,” he told CloudTech. “They do not have the focus and the data centre footprint to compete effectively with the hyperscale cloud providers, so they are tending to drop back into subsidiary roles as partners or on-ramps to the leading cloud companies.”

Synergy’s regular research into cloud infrastructure reveals a continued yawning gap between leaders Amazon Web Services (AWS), which has more than 30% market share, and the competition, with Microsoft, IBM, Google, and Salesforce completing the top five. While Microsoft and Google’s revenues are growing faster than AWS year over year, it is hardly even a dent in the latter’s share.

Dinsdale argues it is this speed of growth which has made it difficult for telcos to compete. “Early on in the growth of the cloud market it had seemed like telcos might have a leading part to play – but the speed of cloud market development and the aggressiveness of the leading cloud providers has largely left them behind,” he said.

“There is now quite a bit of head scratching going on within telcos as they figure out how best to position themselves in the new cloud ecosystem.”

In January last year, Verizon took the unconventional decision to undertake a planned outage in order to future-proof further downtime “in the background with no impact to customers.” The company has warned customers that data will be “irrecoverably deleted” if not retrieved in time.