On Monday, protesters occupied the offices of Microsoft president Brad Smith at the company’s Redmond headquarters, prompting a temporary lockdown of Building 34. The activist group known as “No Azure for Apartheid” livestreamed their sit-in on Twitch, brandishing banners and chanting, ‘Brad Smith, you can’t hide, you’re supporting genocide!’ They also presented a mock legal summons accusing Smith of “crimes against humanity.”
TechCrunch has reached out to Microsoft for further comment on the incident.
Reports from The Verge indicate that the protest included both current employees and former workers who had been discharged for previous activism. This demonstration represents a continuation of months-long protests against Microsoft’s cloud contracts with Israel, with earlier concerns leading to several arrests at the company’s headquarters.
A recent investigation by The Guardian disclosed that Israel utilizes Microsoft’s services to manage data related to millions of calls made by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank on a daily basis.
The manner of this corporate takeover mirrors tactics employed by Google employees over a year ago. In April 2024, nine Google workers organized synchronized protests in offices located in New York and California, with five of them occupying the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian for nine hours. They left demands on his whiteboard and wore shirts declaring “Googler against genocide.”
The Google protesters notably focused on Project Nimbus, a cloud computing and AI contract costing $1.2 billion that supplies the Israeli government and military with essential services. Similar to the recent Microsoft demonstration, these protests were livestreamed on Twitch, and three days afterward, 28 employees associated with those protests faced termination.
