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Members of “No Azure for Apartheid” protest outside Microsoft’s 50th anniversary event on April 4, 2024, in Redmond. Two members of the group disrupted the meeting inside. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
[Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to reflect the circumstances under which each employee’s employment ended.]
Microsoft fired a software engineer who disrupted the Friday event in Redmond where the company launched new Copilot features and marked its 50th anniversary, according to a CNBC report.
The company also moved up the effective date for the resignation of a second employee who disrupted the event.
Both employees stood up separately to condemn the use of Microsoft’s AI technology by the Israeli military.
One called Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman a “war profiteer” and said he had blood on his hands. Another stood up to protest while Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was on stage with his predecessors, Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates.
The internal protests coincided with a demonstration outside the event by the group No Azure for Apartheid, which is made up of Microsoft employees and other tech workers.
The group identified the now-former employees as Ibtihal Aboussad and Vaniya Agrawal. In a companywide message, posted on Medium, Aboussad wrote, in part:
My name is Ibtihal, and for the past 3.5 years, I’ve been a software engineer on Microsoft’s AI Platform org. I spoke up today because after learning that my org was powering the genocide of my people in Palestine, I saw no other moral choice. This is especially true when I’ve witnessed how Microsoft has tried to quell and suppress any dissent from my coworkers who tried to raise this issue. For the past year and a half, our Arab, Palestinian, and Muslim community at Microsoft has been silenced, intimidated, harassed, and doxxed, with impunity from Microsoft. Attempts at speaking up at best fell on deaf ears, and at worst, led to the firing of two employees for simply holding a vigil. There was simply no other way to make our voices heard.
According to CNBC, Microsoft told Aboussad in a message that she could have addressed concerns privately through management or Global Employee Relations instead of disrupting Suleyman’s speech.
The company told Aboussad it “has concluded that your misconduct was designed to gain notoriety and cause maximum disruption to this highly anticipated event,” according to the report.
Agrawal resigned from the company, effective April 11, but the company made the resignation effective immediately, according to the CNBC report.
[Update: A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed that one employee resigned and another employee was let go. The company offered no further comment.]
The protests at Microsoft’s internal event mirrored similar actions by members of the group at GeekWire’s independent Microsoft@50 event in Seattle in March.
Two other organizers, Abdo Mohamed and Hossam Nasr, said they were fired by Microsoft last fall for pro-Palestinian actions on the company’s Redmond campus.
