Microsoft’s Redmond campus was briefly locked down on Monday after activists forced their way into company president Brad Smith’s office. The group, calling itself No Azure for Apartheid, livestreamed the sit-in on Twitch, unfurling banners and chanting: “Brad Smith, you can’t hide, you’re supporting genocide.”
According to The Verge, the action involved both current and former Microsoft employees, some of whom had previously been dismissed for workplace activism. The protesters also issued a mock legal summons accusing Smith of “crimes against humanity.”
The escalation comes after months of demonstrations against Microsoft’s contracts with Israel. A Guardian investigation recently reported that Israel uses Microsoft services to store data from millions of Palestinian phone calls each day across Gaza and the West Bank.
The Redmond protest echoes similar tactics at Google last year. In April 2024, employees staged sit-ins in New York and California offices, with five entering Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian’s office for nine hours. Wearing “Googler against genocide” shirts, they scrawled demands on his whiteboard before being arrested. Google later dismissed 28 workers involved. Their protests focused on Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud and AI deal with Israel, shared with Amazon.
For Microsoft, the confrontation signals rising internal unrest around its Israel contracts, particularly as cloud computing becomes integral to surveillance and military operations.
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