Microsoft blocks emails with ‘Palestine’ in them

Israeli War Crimes are Powered by azure: Microsoft Employees are protesting Israel’s censorship and its actions against Israel

The block of these terms comes at a time when current and former Microsoft employees are protesting against the company’s contracts with the Israeli government. A Microsoft employee, Joe Lopez, disrupted the opening keynote of Build on Monday. Lopez yelled, “How about you show how Israeli war crimes are powered by azure?” at Nadella. Lopez then sent an email to thousands of Microsoft employees, and the company fired him on Monday.

On day two of Build, a Palestinian tech worker disrupted Microsoft’s head of CoreAI during his presentation, and then on Wednesday, two former Microsoft employees disrupted a Build session, and after the commotion a Microsoft executive inadvertently revealed internal messages regarding Walmart’s use of AI.

“Words like ‘Israel’ or ‘P4lestine’ do not trigger such a block,” say NOAA organizers. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration thinks the Microsoft leadership enacted a censorship to discriminate against Palestinian workers and their allies.

Emailing large numbers of employees about topics that are not related to their work is not appropriate. Frank Shaw, a Microsoft spokesman, said that they have an established forum for employees who have opted in to political issues. “Over the past couple of days, a number of politically focused emails have been sent to tens of thousands of employees across the company and we have taken measures to try and reduce those emails to those that have not opted in.”