(Bloomberg) — For the better part of a year, Microsoft has failed to quell a small but persistent revolt by employees bent on forcing the company to sever business ties with Israel over its war in Gaza.
The world’s largest software maker has requested help from the Federal Bureau of Investigation in tracking protests, worked with local authorities to try and prevent them, flagged internal emails containing words like “Gaza” and deleted some internal posts about the protests, according to employees and documents reviewed by Bloomberg. Microsoft has also suspended and fired protesters for disrupting company events.
Despite those efforts, a steady trickle of employees, sometimes joined by outside supporters, continue to speak out in an escalating guerrilla campaign of mass emails and noisy public demonstrations. While still relatively small, the employee activism is notable given the weakening job market and the Trump administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian protests. Last week, 20 people were arrested on a plaza at Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters after disregarding orders by police to disperse. Instead, they chanted and called out Microsoft executives by name, linking arms as police dismantled their makeshift barricades and, one by one, zip-tied them and led them away.
An employee group called No Azure for Apartheid says that by selling software and artificial intelligence tools to Israel’s military, the company’s Azure cloud service is profiting from the deaths of civilians. Microsoft denies that, but the protests threaten to dent its reputation as a thoughtful employer and reasonable actor on the world stage. In recent years, Microsoft has generally stayed above the fray while its industry peers battled antitrust investigations, privacy scandals or controversial treatment of employees.
Now Microsoft is being forced to grapple with perhaps the most politically charged issue of the day: Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Earlier this month, the company announced an investigation into reports by the Guardian newspaper and other news outlets that Israel’s military surveillance agency intercepted millions of Palestinian mobile phone calls, stored them on Microsoft servers then used the data to select bombing targets in Gaza. An earlier investigation commissioned by Microsoft found no evidence its software was used to harm people.
Microsoft says it expects customers to adhere to international law governing human rights and armed conflict, and that the company’s terms of service prohibit the use of Microsoft products to violate people’s rights. “If we determine that a customer — any customer — is using our technology in ways that violate our terms of service, we will take steps to address that,” President Brad Smith said in an interview, adding that the investigation should be completed within several weeks. Smith said employees were welcome to discuss the issue internally but that the company will not tolerate activities that disrupt its operation or staffers.
After Hamas’s deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Microsoft executives were quick to offer condolences and support to employees. “Let us stand together in our shared humanity,” then-human resources chief Kathleen Hogan said in a note a few days after the attacks, which killed some 1,200 soldiers and civilians.
Unity was short-lived: Jewish employees lamented what they said was a troubling rise in antisemitism. Palestinian staffers and their allies accused executives of ignoring concerns about their welfare and the war in Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands. The debate continued in internal chat rooms, meetings with human resources leaders and in question-and-answer sessions with executives. But the chatter was mostly limited to Microsoft’s halls.
That changed in early April at a bash Microsoft hosted to mark the 50th anniversary of the company’s founding. Early that morning, Vaniya Agrawal picked up Ibtihal Aboussad and drove to Microsoft’s campus. The two early-career company engineers — who respectively hail from the Chicago area and Morocco — had both decided to leave Microsoft over its ties to Israel, which had been documented in a series of articles, including by The Associated Press, and reached out to No Azure for Apartheid. “This isn’t just Microsoft Word with a little Clippy in the corner,” said Agrawal, who was arrested on Wednesday. “These are technological weapons. Cloud and AI are just as deadly as bombs and bullets.”
The pair sat together in the event space but acted as if they didn’t know each other. Aboussad went first, interrupting a speech by Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft’s consumer artificial intelligence chief, and throwing a keffiyeh — the traditional Palestinian scarf — onstage before being escorted out by security. About 90 minutes later, Agrawal disrupted a panel featuring Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella and his predecessors, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. Scenes of the protests went viral, racking up millions of views. A Kuwaiti businessman took to X to offer Aboussad a job.
Microsoft was determined to avoid a repeat. A few weeks later, the company contacted the FBI for help, asking for any intelligence on pro-Palestinian protests that may be targeting the company. In 2024, protesters had shut down a freeway near the convention center, where Microsoft was set to hold this year’s Build conference. State and local law enforcement had also been tracking protests against the company since at least March, according to the documents seen by Bloomberg.
“One of our former employees in particular, Hossam Nasr, has been quite active in his posts targeting Microsoft and that we are complicit in genocide,” a Microsoft director of investigations wrote the FBI in an email seen by Bloomberg. The company had identified a handful of employees involved in the demonstrations, including one of their young adult children, he added.
A spokesperson for the FBI in Seattle said it respects the right to peaceful protest and focuses on criminal activity and threats to national security. The FBI declined to comment on any interactions with Microsoft or other members of the public.
The company spent weeks coordinating with local officials before its annual developer conference, set to be held at the Seattle Convention Center in May. Organizers worried it would be difficult to prevent disruptions coming from Microsoft’s own workforce. The convention center received city approval to shut down typically public areas. Entrances were equipped with airport-style security, and clothes or signs representing “activist groups” were banned. Event staffers were reminded not to let employees in unless they had special badges.
Microsoft also tried to address the underlying issue. In a blog post published a few days before the conference, Microsoft cited the previous investigation into the Israeli military’s use of its software, which found no evidence the company’s cloud and AI tools had been used to harm people in the conflict, or that the Israeli Ministry of Defense had violated its terms of service.
These efforts did little to deter employees like Joe Lopez, an engineer who worked in the company’s startup chipmaking group. Lopez, 26, had contacted No Azure for Apartheid on Instagram after reading the articles detailing the Israeli military’s use of Microsoft cloud-computing services. Lopez didn’t consider himself an activist, but had no interest in working for a defense contractor.
So on the first day of the Build conference he attended Nadella’s opening remarks. Once the CEO began speaking about developer tools, Lopez stood on his chair and accused Nadella of perpetuating war crimes. Lopez got a few sentences out before security removed him from the auditorium. He was fired that evening.
Later in the day, a protest held on the street outside briefly blocked the main entrance to the convention center, and one person who tried to push their way into a set of doors was arrested. Local officials mused that that this sort of thing could become the norm for tech industry events, according to emails seen by Bloomberg.
By then, the activists’ tactics had started to come into focus: weaponize the resignations of disaffected employees while generally stopping short of the sort of actions that tend to lead to violence or mass firings. (The ranks of Google employees concerned about the Alphabet Inc. company’s sales to Israeli government entities thinned considerably after dozens of participants of spring 2024 sit-ins were fired.)
No Azure for Apartheid’s ranks, organizers say, are bolstered by employees who aren’t ready to cut ties with the company or go public with their participation. One member estimated that the group counted on the regular support of roughly 200 current and former employees. That’s a tiny fraction of the company’s more than 200,000 employees, but has proved sufficient to organize periodic protests and demonstrations.
Microsoft, for its part, has avoided blanket firings, opting to reinstate two employees it had suspended for sending mass emails criticizing the company’s work with Israel.
Smith said the company allows political discussions, but has to enforce rules about where they take place to limit disruptions to employees. He made a distinction between the internal employee advocacy groups Microsoft executives continue to interact with and the protesters arrested last week, most of whom had never worked for Microsoft.
“To have them engaging in vandalism and destructive behavior obviously makes clear that this aspect of the issue is no longer about dialogue with employees,” he said. “It’s a matter for law enforcement, and that’s how we’re treating it.”
The disruptions seem to have succeeded in raising awareness among employees and the wider public. Some No Azure for Apartheid members say they only began reading about the issue after seeing their colleagues demonstrate. Nearly all of the top-ranked questions submitted by employees for a May all-employee event were related to the company’s work with Israel. Executives didn’t address the topic. Microsoft sponsored a Seattle University event about ethics in tech in June, and the Q&A section was closed after nearly all the top comments were on the topic.
“Is the presence of Microsoft on panels or in sponsorship roles an endorsement of its current practices, or a missed opportunity to hold it accountable?” one attendee wrote.
It’s unclear where the protests go from here. Activists for years have called on consumers and investors to boycott firms with ties to Israel. A giant American corporation like Microsoft cutting ties with the government would be unprecedented. Still, the growing global backlash to Israel’s military operation could fuel more protests and prompt the activists to seek new ways to pressure Microsoft. On Sunday, protesters in kayaks carried signs and held banners, bobbing in the water near Nadella’s and Smith’s lakeside homes and chanting their names.
When the protesters returned to the company’s headquarters last week, they declared a liberated zone and pitched tents, echoing the pro-Palestinian university demonstrations and raising the prospect of a lengthy occupation. Speaking into a microphone, Nasr, the Egyptian-born, Harvard-educated engineer Microsoft flagged to the FBI, asked “friends and colleagues” to look up from their lunches and join him.
No one appeared to take him up on the invitation. A few clapped. Some booed. One man yelled, “Shame on Hamas.” A Redmond police officer drove his SUV to the fringe of the protest area, got on his loudspeaker and threatened to arrest the group for trespassing. The protesters quickly decamped to a public sidewalk where they shouted — largely in vain — for employees crossing a nearby pedestrian bridge to stop and listen.
Nearby, Julius Shan, a Microsoft employee who’d spoken on the plaza, said getting the attention of colleagues “has been a growing challenge” as the company clamps down. Shan said he expected to be fired for protesting, calling the sacrifice “a small one in the face of what Palestinians are facing in their day-to-day lives.”
“All I’m giving up is a cushy six-figure tech job,” he said.
Shortly after, protesters packed their gear into waiting cars as a Microsoft security guard read their license plates into a walkie-talkie.
“This isn’t the end,” Nasr said as the remaining protesters walked off campus. The next day he returned and was arrested.
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