Microsoft fires employee who interrupted CEO Satya Nadella at Build to protest company's Israel business
Microsoft has fired the employee who disrupted CEO Satya Nadella's speech during the Microsoft Build 2025 event last week. The employee, Joe Lopez, who was a firmware engineer in Azure Hardware Systems and Infrastructure (AHSI), had interrupted Nadella's speech saying: 'Satya, how about you show how Microsoft is killing Palestinians?' 'How about you show how Israeli war crimes are powered by Azure?' He was escorted out of the event immediately after this. advertisementLopez's pro-Palestine protest at the event was followed by a number of other disruptions at the Build 2025 event. According to a report by the Associated Press, at least three addresses during the event were disrupted by pro-Palestine protests. Reportedly, protesters also gathered outside the Build 2025 venue in Seattle. Soon after being escorted out of the event, Lopez also sent out a mass email to his colleagues explaining why he interrupted the event and disputing Microsoft's claims of how Azure is being used in Gaza. He says that as one of the 'largest companies in the world, Microsoft has immeasurable power to do the right thing'. He wrote that the company has the power to 'demand an end to this senseless tragedy'.
'I can no longer stand by in silence as Microsoft continues to facilitate Israel's ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people,' Lopez wrote. advertisement'Microsoft openly admitted to allowing the Israel Ministry of Defence 'special access to our technologies beyond the terms of our commercial agreements'. Do you really believe that this 'special access' was allowed only once? What sort of 'special access' do they really need? And what are they doing with it,' Lopez added in the email.In the email, Lopez also addressed Microsoft's recent blog post where the company claims that it conducted an internal audit which 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'.Lopez said that Microsoft's statement 'falls far short of what we are demanding. Non-transparent audits into our cloud operations in Israel (conducted by no other than Microsoft itself and an unnamed external entity) that declare no wrongdoing by the company do not give me any sense of relief. In fact, this response has further compelled me to speak out'. 'We don't need an internal audit to know that a top Azure customer is committing crimes against humanity. We see it live on the internet every day,' his email added.Lopez's disruption questioning Microsoft's work with Israel military wasn't the first instance that a company's employee has done a public protest. In April, Indian-origin Vaniya Agrawal interrupted Satya Nadella, Steve Ballmer, and Bill Gates at the company's 50th anniversary celebration over the company's alleged involvement in Israel's war on Gaza. 'It is undeniable that Microsoft's Azure cloud offerings and AI developments form the technological backbone of Israel's automated apartheid and genocide systems,' she wrote in a letter.advertisementJust a day before Agrawal's protest, another Microsoft engineer, Ibtihal Aboussad, had disrupted Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman's speech at the Microsoft AI event saying, 'Mustafa, shame on you'.Both of them were fired. Last week, Microsoft reportedly quietly started filtering internal emails that contain words like 'Palestine,' 'Gaza,' and 'genocide,' to prevent any conversation around these topics being circulated on the company's Exchange servers.
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Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Opacity Opaque Semi-Transparent Text Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Opacity Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Caption Area Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Opacity Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Drop shadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. In terms of flows, whenever there is a reduction in the tariff risk sentiment, we see flows coming to the US, otherwise we are seeing flows going largely to Europe and to Japan. Some amount coming into emerging markets as well, that also we are seeing. 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But firstly, how do you see the whole chatter around the AI transition because some of the experts also highlight that whenever we have witnessed a technology transition, the Indian companies have adopted it very well but at a later stage. Help us with your assessment of the AI boom because some of the US and even Chinese companies are taking the leap. How will Indian players transition to that? Ajay Bagga: It is catching up. You are getting the end use cases. Agentic software is being launched. A lot of it will be how Microsoft is approaching it, where they have put their software on every cloud platform. They are not only limiting themselves to Azure, but they are going across a lot of platforms and giving end use solutions to customers for that. I think Indian companies will jump start that. We will see a lot of that coming in. But the big issue is the Chinese slowdown and the US looming slowdown. 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They have this software which tracks if the thesis has been pirated from somewhere or plagiarized and they said 92% of the thesis is written by ChatGPT, so do not waste your time. We are asking the student to rewrite it. So, we are seeing things like that happen and all at the back of it will be data centres. So, you need, they will be like electricity. You will need data centres to process all this. We take it very simply. Write me an email, write a thank you and put this and immediately it comes, but it costs a lot at the back end. (You can now subscribe to our ETMarkets WhatsApp channel)
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