Microsoft fires employee who interrupted CEO Satya Nadella at Build to protest company's Israel business
'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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