Microsoft workers say they were dismissed after a protest against the Israel contract

Microsoft pulled two employees who interrupted society Celebration of the 50th anniversary To protest against his work by providing artificial intelligence technology to the Israeli army, according to a group representing workers.

Microsoft has accused one of the workers of a letter of responses Monday of misconduct “designed to gain notoriety and cause a maximum disturbance of this highly anticipated event”. Microsoft says that the other worker had already announced his resignation, but on Monday she ordered him to leave five days earlier.

The demonstrations started on Friday when the Microsoft Ibtihal Aboussad software engineer approached a step where a frame announced new product characteristics and a long -term vision of Microsoft’s AI ambitions.

“You say you are careful to use AI for good, but Microsoft sells weapons in the Israeli army,” Aboussad shouted at the CEO of Microsoft AI, Mustafa Suleyman. “Fifty thousand people are dead and Microsoft feeds this genocide in our region.”

The demonstration forced Suleyman to suspend his speech while he was in difficulty from the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington. Among the participants in the 50th anniversary of the Microsoft Foundation were the co-founder Bill Gates and the former CEO Steve Ballmer.

Microsoft said Suleyman had calmly tried to defuse the situation. “Thank you for your protest, I hear you,” he said. Aboussad continued, shouting that Suleyman and “Tout Microsoft” had blood on his hands. She also launched a Keffiyeh scarf on stage, which has become a symbol of support for the Palestinian people, before being escorted outside the event.

A second protester, Microsoft’s employee, Vaniya Agrawal, interrupted a later part of the event.

Aboussad, based at Microsoft’s Canadian headquarters in Toronto, was invited on Monday to a call representative in which she was immediately invoked, according to the defense group of the defense group No Azure for apartheid, which protested the sale of the Azure cloud platform from Microsoft to Israel.

A survey by the Associated Press revealed earlier this year The fact that Microsoft and Openai AI models were used as part of an Israeli military program to select bombing objectives during recent wars in Gaza and Lebanon. The story also contained the details of an wandering Israeli air strike in 2023 which struck a vehicle carrying members of a Lebanese family, killing three young girls and their grandmother.

In his termination letter, Microsoft told Aboussad that she could have informed her concerns with confidence in a manager. Instead, he said that she had made “hostile, unlike and very inappropriate accusations” against Suleyman and the company and that his “conduct was so aggressive and disruptive that you should be escorted out of the room by security”.

AGRAWAL had already given its two-week notice and was preparing to leave the company on April 11, but on Monday, a director sent an email to what Microsoft “decided to resign immediately in force today”.

It was the most public but not the first protest against Microsoft’s work with Israel. In February, five Microsoft employees were ejected from a meeting With CEO Satya Nadella for having protested against contracts.

“We provide many ways to make all voices heard,” a statement from the company said on Friday. “Above all, we ask that this is done in a way that does not cause commercial disruption. If this happens, we ask participants to move. We are committed to ensuring that our business practices meet the highest standards. ”

Microsoft had refused to say on Friday if it took new measures, but Aboussad and Agrawal expected what happens after losing access to their work accounts shortly after the demonstration.

Dozens of Google workers were dismissed last year after internal demonstrations concerning a contract that she also has with the Israeli government. Employees of employees at Google offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California have targeted an $ 1.2 billion agreement known as the Nimbus Project providing AI technology to the Israeli government.

Google workers subsequently filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board to try to recover their jobs.