Dozens of anti-Israel Microsoft staff, many sporting face masks and keffiyes, swarmed the company’s headquarters in Washington state to protest the Big Tech giant’s ties to Israel’s army.
The protesters set up tents in a “liberated zone” on the Redmond campus, renaming it the “Martyred Palestinian Children’s Plaza” — and toted indicators that urged co-workers to “Join the worker intifada: no labor for genocide.” Other placards said “stop starving Gaza.”
A gaggle calling itself “No Azure For Apartheid” organized Tuesday’s sit-in after The Guardian reported that an Israeli army intelligence company was utilizing Microsoft’s Azure software program to amass recordings of telephone calls made by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
Microsoft said the employees were requested to depart and did so. Bloomberg via Getty Images
“Once again, the enablers of genocide and apartheid choose to criminalize those that oppose the bombing of Palestinians, rather than the war criminals ethnically cleansing and starving our people in Palestine,” the group — an offshoot of No Tech For Apartheid — wrote on X.
The group also revealed a prolonged manifesto calling for a “worker intifada” and stating that “it would not be cogs in the Israeli genocidal machine.”
“The group was asked to leave, and they left,” a Microsoft spokesperson instructed The Post on Wednesday.
About 50 present and former Microsoft employees took half in the sit-in, company officers said.
Microsoft had said it was not conscious “of the surveillance of civilians or collection of their cellphone conversations using Microsoft’s services” and would conduct a formal review of the allegations.
The employees were protesting Microsoft’s work with the Israeli army. Bloomberg via Getty Images
The protest was the newest signal of ongoing unrest at Microsoft over its contracts with Israel.
Microsoft staff called for a “worker intifada.” Bloomberg via Getty Images
In May, the company reportedly started barring staff from utilizing certain phrases in company emails, including “Palestine,” “Gaza” and “genocide.”
It also fired a software program engineer who interrupted a speech by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to protest the help given to the Israel’s army.
A gaggle called “No Azure For Apartheid” led the protest.
Elsewhere, Google fired more than two dozen staff last yr for disruptive anti-Israel protests at its places of work.
As The Post completely reported, Big Tech staff were among the largest particular person donors to New York City mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani’s marketing campaign.
the Demcratic socialist has confronted heat during the marketing campaign cycle over his refusal to back away from the phrase “globalize the intifada.”