Palestinian developer disrupts Microsoft keynote: ‘my people are suffering'
Microsoft's Build developer conference has been interrupted by a protester for the second day in a row. Microsoft's head of CoreAI, Jay Parikh, was on stage discussing the company's Azure AI Foundry efforts when a Palestinian tech worker interrupted his keynote to protest against Microsoft's contracts with the Israeli government.
'Jay! My people are suffering!' said the unnamed tech worker. 'Cut ties! No Azure for apartheid! Free, free Palestine!'
The developer was quickly escorted out of the keynote, while he was screaming at Parikh, a member of Microsoft's senior leadership team, to cut the company's ties with Israel. Hossam Nasr, an organizer with the protest group No Azure for Apartheid, confirmed to The Verge that the developer was part of the group, which has organized several employee protests at Microsoft events recently. Nasr declined to share the protestor's name, and confirmed he's a 'Palestinian tech worker.'
Microsoft employee Joe Lopez disrupted the company's Build opening keynote yesterday, during Satya Nadella's time on stage. While Parikh paused his keynote and remained silent, Nadella carried on while Lopez and a fired Google employee both protested against Microsoft's cloud and AI contracts with the Israeli government. Lopez then emailed thousands of his Microsoft colleagues, asking for them to speak up. 'If we continue to remain silent, we will pay for that silence with our humanity,' Lopez said.
Parikh resumed his keynote on Tuesday morning, stumbling over his words briefly, before a fellow Microsoft colleague appeared on stage to continue discussing the company's AI developer efforts. Microsoft hired Parikh in October, and he has been tasked by Nadella to build the AI developer platform and tools for the next era of apps. He previously helped build Meta's engineering culture when it was Facebook.
This second protest comes shortly after Microsoft announced last week that it had recently conducted an internal review and used an unnamed external firm to assess how its technology is used in the conflict in Gaza. Microsoft says that its relationship with the Israel Ministry of Defense (IMOD) is 'structured as a standard commercial relationship,' and that it has 'found no evidence that Microsoft's Azure and AI technologies, or any of our other software, have been used to harm people or that IMOD has failed to comply with our terms of service or our AI Code of Conduct.'
Two former Microsoft employees also disrupted the company's 50th-anniversary event last month, with one calling Microsoft's AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, a 'war profiteer' and demanding that Microsoft 'stop using AI for genocide in our region.'
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