New York: Microsoft has reportedly expelled the employee who heckled the company’s CEO Satya Nadella’s speech at Build 2025 after shouting ‘Free Palestine!’
Software engineer Joe Lopez has been showed the door apparently for staging protest against what he claimed the company’s supplying of technology to Israeli military, NDTV reported.
Nadella continued his keynote speech just as Lopez was shouting ‘Satya, how about you show how Microsoft is killing Palestinians. How about you show how Israeli war crimes are powered by Azure?’
As he was escorted out of the hall inside the Seattle conference centre, Lopez could still be heard shouting.
Lopez sent an email to Microsoft employees shortly later, explaining that he was ‘shocked by the silence’ of the leadership.
‘Leadership rejects our claims that Azure technology is being used to target or harm civilians in Gaza,’ Lopez said in the email.
Two other former employees previously to call out Microsoft’s alleged support for Israel’s war were Vaniya Agrawal and Hossam Nasr by interrupting a session on AI security during the Build 2025 conference.
Microsoft in a blog post stated that it had supplied software, Azure cloud storage and Azure AI services, including language translation to Israel military.
The company claimed that the services it provided were used in efforts to locate and rescue Israeli hostages.
While admitting ‘significant oversight’, the tech giant said there were no evidences to say that its Azure platform and AI technologies were in use to target or harm people in Gaza.
Rights groups have expressed concern that the company’s AI systems could be flawed and prone to errors potentially causing deaths of innocent people.