This week, dozens of Microsoft employees occupied the company’s east campus in Redmond, Washington in protest against the use of Azure and generative AI technologies by the Israeli military, during their on-going assault on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
This follows an announcement from Microsoft that they would commission another “external” inquiry into their business relationship with Israel’s armed forces, after the Guardian and other papers reported on an alleged collaboration with one particular intelligence division, Unit 8200, that has seen Israel gather data from phones and store it on Microsoft servers overseas.
Amongst other things, the surveillance data is reportedly being used to target airstrikes in the course of an invasion of Gaza that has claimed the lives of tens of thousands, the majority of them civilians. Microsoft declined to comment on the recent Guardian allegations concerning Unit 8200 when approached by RPS, but have previously insisted that their own internal reporting has found “no evidence to date that Microsoft’s Azure and AI technologies have been used to target or harm people in the conflict in Gaza.”
The protest at Microsoft’s campus was brief. According to the Guardian, current and former staff declared one area a ‘Free Zone’, and occupied it with placards that read “Join The Worker Intifada – No Labor for Genocide” and “Martyred Palestinian Children’s Plaza”.
The protestors have also published a call to action online, which reads: “the Liberated Zone is born out of radical love for the rich humanity of Palestinian people. Today, we answer Gaza’s call to action to mobilize, confront, and escalate to force an end to this genocide powered by Microsoft technology.” The protestors were dispersed by police after around two hours, under threat of arrest for trespassing.
Israel’s current attack on Gaza is a response to a Hamas-led militant strike across the border that killed over a thousand people in October 2023. Most of the dead were civilians, with hundreds of others taken hostage.
In amongst ceasefire negotiations with Hamas, Israel’s government now aim to take control of Gaza City after levelling much of the territory and forcibly displacing millions of people, many of whom now face starvation thanks to Israel’s obstruction of aid. All this follows decades of brutal occupation of Palestinian territories, in what a former head of Israel’s own intelligence agency has described as “an apartheid state”.
Microsoft employees have grown outspoken about the company’s subsequent dealings with Israel, as the invasion of Gaza has worn on. Among those demonstrating at Microsoft’s east campus this week was Hossam Nasr – one of two former employees fired in October 2024 for organising a vigil for massacred Palestinians. He and the other fired tech worker, Abdo Mohamed, are part of activist group No Azure For Apartheid, which has called on Microsoft to divest from Israel in a petition signed by hundreds of staff, including members of the Xbox division and subsidiary companies Activision, Bethesda Softworks and Mojang.
Last week, unionised members of Dishonored developers Arkane Studios also threw their weight behind a recent Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions call for consumers to stop buying Microsoft gaming and Xbox products. “We think that Microsoft has no place being [an] accomplice of a genocide,” the Arkane union wrote in an open letter, “and as Microsoft employees, we don’t want to be part of this sinister project for Gaza.”
