Microsoft sacks two employees for protesting at 50th anniversary event

Two Microsoft employees have been dismissed after staging protests during the tech giant’s 50th anniversary celebrations at its Redmond, Washington campus. The employees — software engineers Ibtihal Aboussad and Vaniya Agrawal — interrupted high-profile sessions to criticise the company’s business links with the Israeli government amid the ongoing conflict in Gaza.

Aboussad disrupted a keynote address by Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft's head of consumer AI, accusing the company of "selling AI weapons to the Israeli military" and claiming that "50,000 people have died." She was escorted out of the event venue and later informed via email that she had been terminated for “acts of misconduct,” according to a copy of the notice reviewed by Bloomberg. Microsoft called her actions “hostile, unprovoked and highly inappropriate.”

Agrawal interrupted a separate Q&A session featuring CEO Satya Nadella, along with former chiefs Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. Though she had planned to resign on 11 April, the company made her departure effective immediately following the protest.

Both are members of No Azure for Apartheid, an internal group calling for Microsoft to end its cloud services contract with the Israeli government. They claimed they lost access to corporate accounts shortly after their protest on Friday.

The protests add to the growing wave of employee-led activism in the tech industry regarding corporate involvement in defence and international conflicts. Microsoft has yet to comment publicly on the dismissals.

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