Microsoft fires engineers who protested during company's 50th anniversary
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
“You should have dumped your complaint in a black hole instead of speaking up.”
Brave folks: they’ll no doubt see a ton of harassment and their future employment prospects (or even immigration status) may be affected. But if I found out that technology I was working on was being used to kill people, I might choose to flame out in the same manner. It’s hard to wash blood off your hands.
"... A hatch opens up and the aliens said \
'We're sorry to learn that you soon will be dead. \
But, though may find this slightly macabre, \
We prefer your extinction to the loss of our job.'"
https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/16cqzu6/we...
Bill Watterson had a good grasp of human nature.
As Microsoft said it seems that they work quite willful in their disruption. People seems to have forgotten how to be effective at making changes. They should have first gone and made their grievances known in a private way to the appropriate people. Get the attention of leadership in a way that is respectful and they in turn will be more willing to hear what you have to say. If that doesn't work you begin to broaden out your objections to get others involved and to make the issue more well-known. Seems people have forgotten that part abd skip those initial steps going straight to the disrupting ways. As if they are babies throwing a tantrum. I don't know if it's because they were never given discipline when they were younger and so throwing the tantrum is the way that they've learned gets them what they want.
I think the protesters do have a valid point but I'm with Microsoft on this one. They didn't try and have their grievances handled in a productive way by going to those and making their case they started by just being disruptive jerks. Even if they have the most valid point in the world, the way they presented it should get them tossed out.
Every Fortune 500 company does business in Israel, which means it directly or indirectly supports their military. If someone is just learning that I'm not sure how useful they are to anyone's cause.
And then we told them not to and they (mostly) stopped. The correct way to effect this change is politically. Not at a company anniversary party.
Talking about an issue is productive if you need to bring awareness to it. There is nobody on the planet who isn't aware that something is happening in Israel and Gaza. And when an issue is this divisive, calling attention to it mobilises both sides. (See polling following the protests at Columbia, for example. Awareness went up. But net support increased more for Israel than Palestine because people just defaulted to their priors.)
https://news.gallup.com/poll/657404/less-half-sympathetic-to...
I never argued otherwise. I'm saying look at the polling immediately after the protests.
Media reporting of atrocities drives down favourability for Israel. Media reporting of the protests drives down favourability for Palestine. It's why, despite favourability for Israel monotonically declining since 2023, its net favourability vis-a-vis Palestine blipped up in '24.
What's not? Literally look at the Gallup poll you cited [1] to see Palestinian favourability dip in 2024.
I'll note that part of it is the media's fascination with the pro-Hamas minority at pro-Palestinian protests. Organisers are getting a little better at screening those folks out.
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/657404/less-half-sympathetic-to...
Of course there is [1][2]. (You see similar effects from e.g. bridge blocking in the broader protest literature.)
And again, what do you think happened in 2024 that caused support for Palestine per your source to drop?
> media is staunchly Zionist
The population has been broadly pro-Israel until very recently. The media market is, in the end, a market.
[1] https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/49311-opinion-on-...
[2] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2024/05/03/p...
Also this poll doesn’t back up what you are saying. These protests are as much anti-israel as they are pro-palestine, and support for Israel has been consistently dwindling. The protests continued throughout 2024 especially leading up to the November election, yet in 2025 support for Palestine was in all time high. Most likely the support dropped in 2024 because the horrors of the 2023 oct 7 terrorist attacks were still in fresh memory, so support for Palestine, which had been steadily increasing, took a momentary dip, but quickly readjusted at an increasing rate as the accusations of the Gaza genocide became ever harder to deny.
I’m citing the poll the commenter I’m responding to originally cited. Given they trust that poll, it made sense to respond to it. I was also making a point about a dip in 2024; the newer poll doesn’t update those data.
> support for Israel has been consistently dwindling
Literally what I’ve been arguing [1].
Support for Israel is monotonically decreasing. When protests are covered, support for Palestine dips.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/04/08/how-ameri...
There's a right order in which to do things which lends credence to what you're doing. Right now they're just viewed as a bunch of idiotic disruptors because they didn't do things in the right order.
Why did you automatically assume they didn’t? Do you have special knowledge of the situation or did you just assume that was the case solely on the words of a company press release? Clearly the company would have no reason to use the same tired recycled excuses in press releases of “you should have talked to us privately” every company claims after a protest (which often get proved out as false in later employment lawsuits).
It seems odd that someone would write, “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” if the issue had never been raised or discussed prior.
Do they deserve to be fired? Sure. Does that mean protesting and disrupting a celebration was wrong after many people had tried to voice opposition of their use of AI this way, I don’t know that I can agree.
If you have ever worked at a Fortune 500 company, you would know that you might as well scream into a void if you think a company is going to reverse their decision to make more profit because of some whiney employees who don’t want to “just do your job”. Sometimes disruptive actions are the only way to bring attention to the things companies do, as can be seen by this being covered in the press , which means more attention has been brought to the issue, which was exactly the goal was it not?
Reading about her history and role in No Azure for Apartheid it is very unrealistic to assume this is the first action they did.
Instead of just posting speculation, I went and checked, and https://noazureforapartheid.com was archived on the wayback machine in November last year https://web.archive.org/web/20241115041755/https://noazurefo... where they list 4 simple demands. It is unlikely they never sent those demands to Microsoft‘s senior management over those 4+ months.
"Excuse me sir, but I've just become aware that you signed a deal to provide tech support for an army that is conducting a genocidal campaign. Would you please consider rethinking this contract? Thanks."
That's respectful, but completely pointless. Microsoft knows who its doing business with.
Hold your heads high Ibtihal Aboussad and Vaniya Agrawal.
Maybe? It also comes across as petulant and self indulgent. I certainly wouldn't be thrilled for everyone's pet political issue to become the centrepiece at company celebrations.
My pet war has been Ukraine. (And to a lesser degree, the civil war in Ethiopia.) If someone interrupted my CEO at our annual holiday party to go off on a tangent about either of those wars, I'd consider it silly and disrespectful. (If it were done in front of a client or the press, I'd ask that they be fired.)
It's frankly unclear to me that there is. The definition of genocide seems to have expanded from its historical roots, and I haven't seen the pro-Palestinian faction in America make a credible claim that Israel is fighting this war materially differently from how every other war has been fought in the past decades by each of the U.S., Russia and China. I think the war should stop. But because war is horrible, not because it's in a special moral bucket.
But! I haven't done extensive research on this. So I'm really not claiming to know one way or another, just that I've put the whole thing into the same bucket as the Uyghurs, Sudan, Eritrea, North Korea and the other horrific places on the planet that I don't have much control over.
> calling it your “pet” war shows you aren’t serious
I mean, yes. I'm also about as serious about it as these folks were. Namely, I haven't had much of a tangible effect on either war for years. It's not a pet war if you do something effective about it.
(I did help with getting some...erm...stuff into Ukraine in 2023, but that's two years ago. I'll also dare to say that's a hell of a lot more I did for that war than someone mouthing off at a conference has done.)
Right, the emphasis is on their sacrifice. Hence why I called it self indulgent. I had about as much effect on the wars I followed as they've had on this one.
It's orthogonal to self indulgence; what defines that is the effect. And it's inherently subjective. I'd argue most religious animal sacrifices are self indulgent. Obviously, the believers think otherwise. (Nobody asks the animal.)
In this case, they absolutely made a sacrifice. But the main effect is the fact that they sacrificed something. The sacrifice didn't actually do anything. Contrast that with e.g. putting yourself at risk to save somebody. That is more than performative.
I mean yes, we're all talking about it. I forgot what the protesters at Google who locked themselves into offices were specifically protesting, but everyone I know at Google talked about that, too. (Huh, it was also Israel [1].) This sort of outburst has basically never been an effective form of protest.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/18/google-terminates-28-employe...
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. If there is an attempted genocide in Gaza there is absolutely one in Ukraine.
If you are working at the likes of Microsoft without that knowledge and disagree with the way those technologies are used by governments, maybe you should not be working for them at all, especially if you have "morals", "principles" or "ethics".
There are no angels in big tech. You know that.
There are multiple stories about the protest. That, in turn, will animate both sides.
The Americans who lightly support Israel aren't bombing anything. They're the ones who get animated by giving the issue name recognition.
While 55+ is strongly pro-Israel, 35 to 54-year olds are moderately pro-Israel [1]. So sure, in 30 to 60 years we might see a demography-driven shift. (Gen Z isn't pro-Palestine as much as more evenly divided.)
One of the strategic mistake the American pro-Palestinian movement made from the beginning was deploying majoritarian tactics. Those don't work if you don't actually have a majority. (This protest is an example of it.) Instead, the movement should be deploying minority tactics in the way e.g. the gun lobby does.
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/611375/americans-views-israel-p...
Here is one a year later from the same publisher: https://news.gallup.com/poll/657404/less-half-sympathetic-to...
33% are sympathetic to Palestinians vs. 46% who are more sympathetic to Israel. Support for Israel is the lowest since they started measuring in 2001 and is showing a pretty rapid decline. Among democratic voters Palestine support is actually greater than support for Israel (59% vs 21%). Among the youngest age group (18-34 years old) support is 48% for Palestine vs 31% for Israel.
The takeaway isn’t just the shifting demography it is also a shift in support. More Americans are changing their opinion, away from Israel and towards Palestine. Especially among the Democratic voter base.
In Australia 60% of people view palestine favourably whereas only 39% view israel favourably (ADL 2024 Antisemitism survey)https://www.adl.org/adl-global-100-index-antisemitism
It’s very difficult to disentangle how much the effect is driven by Jewish and Israeli diasporas (and others’ proximities to them) [1] versus outright bias. An Australian paper isn’t going to be held to account the same way the Times will be, arguable from both sides, because the latter serves a larger and more-diverse audience.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_population_by_country