Report: Microsoft fires two employees who protested inside 50th anniversary event

Microsoft has fired the two software engineers who disrupted the event in Redmond Friday morning where the company launched new Copilot features and marked its 50th anniversary, according to a CNBC report.

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.

We’ve contacted Microsoft for comment on the report.

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.