Microsoft employee interrupts Satya Nadella’s keynote to protest Gaza ties, says, ‘Microsoft is killing Palestinians!’

A Microsoft employee interrupted CEO Satya Nadella’s keynote address at the company’s annual Build conference on Monday, accusing the tech giant of supporting Israeli military operations through its cloud services, India Today reported.

As per the report, the protester, identified as Joe Lopez, a firmware engineer with Azure Hardware Systems and Infrastructure (AHSI), has been with Microsoft for four years. During Nadella’s speech, Lopez stood up and shouted, “Satya, how about you show how Microsoft is killing Palestinians?” He further accused the company of enabling Israeli war crimes through its Azure cloud platform. Security personnel swiftly escorted him out of the venue.

Shortly after the disruption, Lopez circulated an internal email—also published on Medium—explaining the motivations behind his public protest. “I can no longer stand by in silence as Microsoft continues to facilitate Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people,” he wrote, criticising the company’s response to concerns about its involvement in the Gaza conflict.

Lopez’s comments were directed at a recent Microsoft blog post in which the firm stated that an internal review—assisted by an unnamed third-party firm—found “no evidence to date” that Microsoft technologies had been used to harm civilians in Gaza. But Microsoft has acknowledged selling advanced artificial intelligence and cloud computing services to the Israeli military during the war in Gaza, AP reported.

 The employee, however, dismissed the findings, calling the audit “non-transparent” and “self-serving”.

“Microsoft openly admitted to allowing the Israel Ministry of Defence ‘special access to our technologies beyond the terms of our commercial agreements,’” Lopez added. “Do you really believe that this ‘special access’ was allowed only once?”

He further claimed that the company need not rely on internal assessments when the broader implications of its partnerships were visible daily. “We don’t need an internal audit to know that a top Azure customer is committing crimes against humanity. We see it live on the internet every day,” he said.

The report adds that Lopez called on Microsoft to take a stronger moral stance. “As one of the largest companies in the world, Microsoft has immeasurable power to do the right thing,” he wrote, warning that public trust was eroding and that “boycotts will increase” if the company does not act.

This is not the first time Microsoft employees have raised concerns about the company’s role in the conflict. Last month, Vaniya Agrawal, an Indian-origin staff member, confronted Nadella along with former executives Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates at a 50th anniversary celebration, denouncing the firm’s cloud infrastructure as integral to what she called Israel’s “automated apartheid and genocide systems”.

Just a day earlier, another engineer, Ibtihal Aboussad, disrupted a company AI event during a speech by AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, exclaiming: “Mustafa, shame on you.”

The spate of internal protests highlights growing unrest among Microsoft staff over the company’s operations and partnerships in regions of conflict. Microsoft has yet to respond publicly to the latest protest.