Akamai Technologies Inc. of Cambridge delivers massive quantities of online data for many of the world’s biggest companies. But one of its customers, Apple Inc., allegedly balked at the tens of millions of dollars it was paying Akamai and disabled its popular video conferencing service FaceTime in a bid to cut costs, according to a lawsuit filed in a federal court.

The case filed in early February in US District Court in San Jose, Calif., was not brought by Akamai, but by several law firms, including one that has successfully sued Apple in a related patent lawsuit.

Akamai is not directly involved in the lawsuit, and declined to comment. But court papers provide a rare glimpse of the relationship between Akamai and one of its major customers.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

In 2012, Apple lost a patent infringement lawsuit filed by VirnetX, a Nevada company that claimed Apple illicitly used its technology to enable people to communicate through the FaceTime feature.

That dispute prompted Apple to instead route FaceTime calls through relay servers owned by Akamai. Court papers contend Apple was paying Akamai so much for this service — $50 million in one six-month period in 2013 — that it developed a cheaper alternative using its newest operating software at the time, iOS 7.

But because many iPhone users continued to use the older phones or operating software, Apple was still paying hefty fees to Akamai. So, the lawsuit alleged, in 2014 Apple deliberately disabled FaceTime on those phones, such as the iPhone 4 series, to encourage their owners to upgrade to the newest operating software or buy new phones. According to the filing, an Apple executive testified during the patent dispute with VirnetX that the company did this to reduce its usage of the costly Akamai data service.

The plaintiff in the lawsuit is Christina Grace, a Marin County, Calif., resident who owned an iPhone 4 in April of 2014, when the older version of FaceTime was shut down. The suit charges that Apple illegally interfered with the ability of iPhone 4 and 4S owners to use their devices, and engaged in fraudulent business practices under California law.

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