For the second time in the last month, Microsoft employees disrupted high-level executives speaking at an event celebrating the company’s 50th anniversary on 4 April, in protest against the company’s role in Israel’s ongoing siege on Gaza.
AI executive Mustafa Suleyman was interrupted by employees Ibtihal Aboussad and Vaniya Agrawal. The two were fired within days. The Microsoft president Brad Smith and the former CEO Steve Ballmer were shouted down at Seattle’s Great Hall on 20 March by a current and former employee.
The April event was preceded by a rally outside that also included current and former employees of the tech giant. Protesters projected a sign onto the hall’s wall saying, “Microsoft powers genocide” – a reference to Israel’s extensive use of the company’s AI and cloud computing services since 7 October 2023, as “the IDF’s insatiable demand for bombs was matched by its need for greater access to cloud computing services,” the Guardian reported.
The rally and disruption were the latest of a growing number of protests in which employees at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington state, have urged the company to cut ties with Israel, after discontent around the issue among some of them simmered for a year-plus on company message boards, in emails and on calls with what the company calls “workplace conflict” team members.
Taken together, the protests suggest that more will follow, as well as employees deciding to leave the company altogether, according to present and past employees who spoke to the Guardian. Microsoft did not reply to a request for comment.
The series of events echoes those at other tech companies, including Google, where employees have likewise protested against the company’s ties to Israel and been fired. In February, Google changed its AI guidelines, removing commitments not to use artificial intelligence for surveillance or weapons.
Unrest on the rise in Redmond
Former Microsoft software engineer Hossam Nasr described the situation at the company as “very close to a tipping point”. He highlighted the recent events, a 24 February demonstration at the company’s first in-person town hall since early in the pandemic and a 24 October lunchtime vigil for the tens of thousands of Palestinians that Israel has killed in the last 18 months, as examples of rising discontent.
The February demonstration was short-lived: as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella began talking up new products, five employees stood on a platform above, exposing lettering on their T-shirts that spelled out the words, “Does Our Code Kill Kids, Satya?” Within minutes, several men quietly ushered them out of the room. As for the October rally, Nasr and researcher and data scientist Abdo Mohamed helped organize the event; both were fired shortly afterward.
The dismissals, together with a spate of recent, in-depth articles about Microsoft’s role in Israel’s siege on Gaza, have helped galvanize those in the company who are concerned about the issue, according to Nasr, former employee Aboussad, and two current employees who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation.
Aboussad told the Guardian she had grown increasingly conflicted in recent months as a software engineer working in AI. After several years at the company, she said, recent reporting “showed [me] more and more Microsoft’s deep ties to the Israeli government”. An AP report on the use of US-made AI in Gaza, including Microsoft’s, was the “last straw because it showed that AI is being used to target and murder Palestinians … I began thinking, there’s no way I can stay at Microsoft and have clean hands,” Aboussad said.
The software engineer said it was impossible to know if her work was deployed in Gaza, since the company “anonymizes” all contracts with the Israeli government. At the same time, she said, “I’m not confident my paycheck doesn’t originate from money that comes from the Israeli government.”
Within days of speaking to the Guardian, Aboussad was fired. A half-dozen or so colleagues have told her they were thinking of leaving the company, she said.
From Viva Engage to IRL
Prior to the recent, in-person protests, Microsoft employees had been mostly weighing in online about Hamas’s attack and Israel’s ongoing retaliation. Some discourse on Microsoft’s Viva Engage company message board grew contentious. One employee posted: “There is no symmetry between people who educate their children on [sic] schools to murder Jewish people and people that are just defending themselves.” Several pleas for compassion for Palestinians were met with the blunt epithet “terrorist supporters”.
Employees concerned about the fate of Palestinians or critical of Israel have also been complaining about what they viewed as a double standard since shortly after 7 October. They allege Microsoft censors their viewpoints in internal forums but does not treat supporters of Israel the same. One employee who spoke with the Guardian shared screenshots of emails from members of the company’s “Global Employee Relations Team”, whose job is to handle “complex and sensitive matters, conduct investigations and manage workplace conflict”, according to Microsoft. One email details an employee complaint over the use of terms such as “ethnic cleansing” on Viva Engage, to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza. Another message underlines the need to follow “company values” like “respect and kindness to each other” when posting about Israel and Gaza or the West Bank. On 16 November 2023, Microsoft blocked employees from posting in the message board’s “All Company” channel altogether, which broadcasts to all of Microsoft’s 400,000 employees and vendors.
The tenor of online, internal activism changed over the course of 2024, said Nasr. In the months following 7 October, many employees with concerns about events in Gaza focused on Microsoft’s public statements and circulated a petition urging the company to publicly call for a ceasefire. But their attention gradually turned to the company’s own business practices, he said. By mid-year, Nasr and others were organizing “No Azure for Apartheid” a reference to Microsoft’s Azure suite of cloud computing and AI products. The group gathers signatures from fellow employees on a petition urging the company to cancel its cloud computing and AI contracts with the Israeli military and to disclose its ties to the country’s government.
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Reports of Microsoft’s role in Gaza roil employee discussions
In the new year, documents obtained by Dropsite, an independent news outlet, revealed “a ‘gold rush’ among tech companies seeking to provide services to the Israeli military”– including Microsoft. Dropsite shared the documents with the Guardian, leading to another story, and with +972 magazine, an Israeli outlet. A month later, on 18 February, the AP published its own reporting. This run of detailed, in-depth reporting fueled the simmering concerns among some Microsoft employees. The day after the AP’s investigation published, according to screenshots of Viva Engage messages, an employee asked senior leadership about the articles, wondering whether “Microsoft has completely abandoned its … Human Rights Statements?”
The post notes that Microsoft’s human rights commitments include “champion[ing] the positive role of technology across the globe” and “reduce[ing] the risk of harm”.
“However, this AP investigation clearly shows the AI technology we provide directly enables Gaza’s destruction,” the post reads. By the next morning, the post was removed from the chat.
The handful of articles has been “absolutely critical” to offline organizing efforts, said Anna Hattle, who has been with the company nearly five years. This is particularly true since “a lot of tech workers exist in a bubble, and Microsoft wants to keep it that way. An employee who doesn’t know their work is being used for AI weapons isn’t going to do anything about it.” At work and at rallies, she said, “individual conversations with [fellow employees]” helps spread information contained in the coverage.
Nasr said that No Azure for Apartheid also worked with Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) to add Microsoft to its list of boycott campaigns. BDS announced the campaign 3 April, highlighting how the “Israeli army relies heavily on Microsoft to meet technological requirements.”
At the same time, one Microsoft employee told the Guardian she was “exhausted” by the struggle to draw attention to what she sees as a betrayal of the company’s stated values in its contracts with Israel. As an example, she cited an event in which Palestinian journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin was invited in November 2023, to speak to employees. Israeli employees filed reports alleging that the organizers were antisemitic, and the company cancelled the event. She also pointed to the back and forth on Viva Engage, including one screenshot that showed an employee calling Palestinians “Killers. Terrorists. Monsters.”
Other employees have already left. On 4 December, Angela Yu sent an email to nearly 30,000 employees announcing her resignation. “I joined Microsoft with the belief that my work will advance technology ‘for the good of humanity,’” she wrote. Yu highlighted the recent reporting on Microsoft’s ties to Israel and said: “It hurts my conscience to know that the products you and I work on are enabling the Israeli military to accelerate its project of ethnic cleansing.”
Yu went on to urge anyone reading to sign “No Azure for Apartheid’s” petition. She noted that the company had dropped business contracts for ethical reasons before – including in 1986, when it cut ties with South Africa over apartheid.
At the time, Microsoft’s global sales were about $100m, according to contemporaneous news coverage – or less than the current value of one contract between the tech company and Israel’s ministry of defense.
The “exhausted” employee said these numbers point to the difficulty of protesting against Microsoft’s presence in Israel. The company is “a money machine”, she said. “All they care about is money. AI and work, work, work.”
