Protesters stormed Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters on Monday. They entered president Brad Smith’s office in Building 34, which forced a temporary lockdown of the facility. The group, calling themselves “No Azure for Apartheid,” live-streamed their sit-in on Twitch. They hoisted banners, chanted ‘Brad Smith, you can’t hide, you’re supporting genocide!’, and posted a mock legal summons charging Smith with “crimes against humanity.”
The protest reportedly included both active Microsoft workers and former employees who had been fired for previous activism. This escalation on Monday follows months of protests over Microsoft’s cloud contracts with Israel, which have included recent arrests at the company headquarters.
A recent investigation revealed that Israel uses Microsoft’s services to store data from millions of calls each day made by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
This corporate takeover mirrors tactics used by Google employees more than a year ago. In April 2024, nine Google workers staged coordinated protests across New York and California offices. Five of them occupied Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian’s office for nine hours. They wrote demands on his whiteboard and wore shirts that read “Googler against genocide.”
Those Google protesters targeted Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract that provides Israel’s government and military with cloud computing and AI tools. Their sit-ins and arrests were also live-streamed on Twitch. Three days after those protests, 28 involved employees were fired.