New York: A Microsoft engineer disrupted CEO Satya Nadella’s speech at the company’s conference in Seattle, protesting against Microsoft’s ties with Israel.
Joe Lopez, a firmware engineer who has worked on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform for four years, heckled Nadella addressing the company’s Build 2025 developer conference, The Indian Express reported.
Nadella was speaking on the stage when Lopez climbed on his chair, shouting ‘Satya, how about you show how Microsoft is killing Palestinians? How about you show how Israeli war crimes are powered by Azure?’ The security personnel immediately escorted Lopez out of the hall.
A former Google employee also came along, before Lopez was removed, shouting ‘Free Palestine, I’m a former Google worker and all tech workers…”’.Security personnel quickly stopped her.
Lopez later sent an email expressing his concern over what is reported Microsoft’s cloud services to Israel’s military operations.
Lopez wrote as reported by The Verge that he was watching the ‘ongoing genocide’ in Gaza in ‘horror’, adding ‘I have been shocked by the silence, inaction, and callousness of world leaders as Palestinian people are suffering, losing their lives and their homes while they plead for the rest of the world to pay attention and act’.
He accused Microsoft of continuing to ‘facilitate Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people’, adding that he is unable to remain silent.
He referenced previous protests at Microsoft when two employees— Ibtihal and Vaniya— were fired over the Palestinian message after disrupting the company’s 50th anniversary celebration.
Lopez wrote: ‘I saw Ibtihal and Vaniya’s disruption of Microsoft’s 50th anniversary on April 4 and was shocked to hear the words coming from their mouths. Microsoft is killing kids? Is my work killing kids?’
Lopez’s protest came after Microsoft claimed in a blog post that its ‘internal review’ along with an independent third party firm found ‘no evidence’ of Microsoft’s Azure and AI technologies in use to ‘target or harm people in the conflict in Gaza.’