Microsoft engineer interrupts CEO Satya Nadella's keynote speech, says Microsoft is killing Palestinians
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's keynote speech at the Microsoft Build event on Monday was interrupted by an employee who accused the company of 'killing Palestinians'. The employee, who has been identified as Joe Lopez, is a firmware engineer under Azure Hardware Systems and Infrastructure (AHSI) and has been with the company for the past four years. During Nadella's speech, Lopez yelled, 'Satya, how about you show how Microsoft is killing Palestinians?' 'How about you show how Israeli war crimes are powered by Azure?' he added. Lopez was escorted out of the event immediately after.advertisementHowever, the Microsoft employee did not stop at that. Soon after, he sent an internal email where he wrote about why he decided to disrupt the event with a pro-Palestinian protest. 'I can no longer stand by in silence as Microsoft continues to facilitate Israel's ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people,' Lopez wrote in his email that has been published on Medium.Lopez's protest comes just days after Microsoft published a blog post where it says that it conducted an internal review, along with support from a third-party firm, and that, according to its research, there was '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 also addresses this blog post in his email. He says 'their [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'.advertisement'Microsoft openly admitted to allowing the Israel Ministry of Defense '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 'special access' do they really need? And what are they doing with it,' he adds.'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 further reads.Lopez says that 'as one of the largest companies in the world, Microsoft has immeasurable power to do the right thing'. He says that the company has the power to 'demand an end to this senseless tragedy'.Lopez warns: 'The boycotts will increase and our [Microsoft's] image will continue to spiral into disrepair.'This isn't the first pro-Palestine protest heard from inside the company. Just last month, Indian-origin Vaniya Agrawal confronted 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.Just a day before Agrawal's protest, another Microsoft engineer, Ibtihal Aboussad, had disrupted the Microsoft AI event during the company's AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman's speech saying, 'Mustafa, shame on you'.
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