Microsoft has fired two employees who organized an unauthorized vigil at the company’s headquarters for Palestinians killed in Gaza during Israel’s war with Hamas. Both workers were members of a coalition of employees called “No Azure for Apartheid” that has opposed Microsoft’s sale of its cloud-computing technology to the Israeli government.
But they contended that Thursday’s event was similar to other Microsoft-sanctioned employee giving campaigns for people in need. Mohamed, who is from Egypt, said he now needs a new job in the next two months to transfer a work visa and avoid deportation.
Google earlier this year fired more than 50 workers in the aftermath of protests over technology the company is supplying the Israeli government amid the Gaza war. The firings stemmed from internal turmoil and sit-in protests at Google offices centered on “Project Nimbus,” a $1.2 billion contract signed in 2021 for Google and Amazon to provide the Israeli government with cloud computing and artificial intelligence services.
Microsoft has fired two employees who organized an unauthorized vigil at the company’s headquarters
But they contended that Thursday’s event was similar to other Microsoft-sanctioned employee giving campaigns
Seems like employer approval is an important piece.
But I think the most interesting part of the article is
Nasr said his firing was disclosed on social media by the watchdog group Stop Antisemitism more than an hour before he received the call from Microsoft. The group didn’t immediately respond Friday to a request for comment on how it learned about the firing.
Why would Microsoft fire an employee for holding a vigil, it’s not like they …
…called “No Azure for Apartheid”
Oh. Thanks for drawing attention to this, Microsoft! I appreciate that they’re so willing to invoke the Streisand Effect.
I hope those employees land somewhere where they build something that costs Microsoft a lot of profit.
Yeah, I don’t think they would have been fired if they had just held a vigil without shitting all over their employers brands.
To add some more context. Microsoft (and a lot of tech companies) have a relatively big presence in Israel, and that includes a lot of Israeli employees and acquired business.
IBM provided business machines (internationally, even) to Nazi Germany, probably a big help in bureaucratically processing those millions of murders they were doing. I can’t (or perhaps, “won’t” is truer) imagine how much cloud compute a modern genocide requires.
Isn’t it punishment enough having to use Azure? It’s worse than having to use Google Cloud…
