REDMOND, Washington— Microsoft’s employees are once again protesting against the company’s economic connections with the Israeli military. This week, there were protests at the business’s campus for the second day in a row on Wednesday. The protestors wanted Microsoft to cease its contracts with Israel right away and said the corporation was implicated in human rights crimes.
The protests were sparked by a recent article in The Guardian, a British daily, that said the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) utilized Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform to store phone call data they got from spying on Palestinians. The report says that the intelligence was used to find places in Gaza to bomb.
Microsoft said late last week that it has hired the law firm Covington & Burling to do a “urgent review” of the claims in response. The corporation said that using its technology in this way would break its regular terms of service, which say that mass surveillance and misuse of its technologies are not allowed. Microsoft has promised to make the results of this review public.
But the “No Azure for Apartheid” organization, which has been protesting Microsoft’s contracts with the Israeli military for months, says that the promised review is not enough. The group says that the company’s technology is being used to “surveil, starve, and kill Palestinians,” and that a review is just a way to buy time.
This isn’t the first time employees have protested. The Associated Press found out in February that the Israeli military’s use of Microsoft’s commercial AI technologies had gone up by almost 200 times after the devastating Hamas strike on October 7, 2023. The AP said that the IDF utilizes Azure to transcribe, translate, and process intelligence. This information is then checked against Israel’s own AI-enabled targeting systems. Microsoft had done an earlier investigation after that story, and it stated that study found no proof that its technology was being used to “target or harm people in the conflict.” The corporation did not give a copy of the earlier review or disclose who did it.
Microsoft has punished employees who protested in the past. In May, an employee who interrupted CEO Satya Nadella’s speech to protest the contracts was fired. Two other employees were sacked in April after a similar protest during the company’s 50th anniversary party.
On Wednesday, the protests at Microsoft’s campus became worse. Protesters threw red paint on a famous business symbol, which authorities said looked like blood. The Redmond Police Department said they detained 18 people for trespassing and causing mischief after the demonstrators refused to leave. There were no injuries recorded.