Alphabet Inc.’s Google flouted a court order requiring it to save records of employee chats in antitrust litigation over its Google Play app store policies, a federal judge concluded.

Google gave almost 360 employees “carte blanche” not to preserve chats, which are typically deleted after 24 hours, as potential evidence that may be crucial to the complex cases brought against the company by Epic Games Inc. and a coalition of state attorneys general, US District Judge James Donato in San Francisco said in a ruling on Tuesday. “In effect, Google adopted a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy for chat preservation, at the expense of its preservation duties,” he said.