Microsoft bans word Palestine in internal emails, Windows 95 chime creator slams company for Israel ties

India Today

22-05-2025

Microsoft has been facing mounting criticism over its alleged ties to Israel's military. And some of its most vocal critics are its own employees. In 2025 alone, there have been at least three instances of Microsoft staff speaking out against the company's involvement with the Israeli military. In a recent blog post, Microsoft attempted to address the concerns, claiming there is no evidence that its technology is being used to harm or kill people in Gaza. And the latest reported step taken by the company appears to be censorship. Microsoft has reportedly quietly begun filtering internal emails that contain terms such as 'Palestine,' 'Gaza,' and 'genocide,' preventing them from reaching recipients on the company's Exchange servers.advertisementThe alleged email block was revealed by No Azure for Apartheid, a group of pro-Palestinian Microsoft employees, who claim the filter was activated shortly after the company's flagship developer conference, Microsoft Build 2025, was disrupted by an Azure engineer on Monday. While variations like 'Israel' or 'P4lestine' reportedly pass through unblocked, staff say the ban is evidence of growing restrictions on internal dissent. Windows 95 chime creator joins criticsAdding to the growing backlash, musician and artist Brian Eno (who is popularly known for composing the startup chime for Windows 95) has publicly criticised the company for its role in 'surveillance, violence, and destruction in Palestine'. In an Instagram post, Eno urged Microsoft to 'suspend all services that support any operations that contribute to violations of international law'.
'I gladly took on the [Windows 95] project as a creative challenge and enjoyed the interaction with my contacts at the company,' Eno wrote. 'I never would have believed that the same company could one day be implicated in the machinery of oppression and war.'advertisementEno particularly condemned Microsoft's contracts with Israel's Ministry of Defense, which the company last week in a blog post. Microsoft maintains that there is no evidence to suggest its tools have been used to target civilians in Palestine, but this has done little to ease concerns among critics.
Protests by Microsoft employeesMicrosoft has recently seen a string of protests from its employees. During CEO Satya Nadella's keynote speech at Build 2025 event on Monday, a company engineer, Joe Lopez, interrupted the session to accuse Microsoft of complicity in Israel's military actions. 'Satya, how about you show how Microsoft is killing Palestinians?' Lopez shouted from the audience, before being escorted out. Lopez, a firmware engineer with Microsoft's Azure Hardware Systems and Infrastructure (AHSI) division, followed up with an internal email shared on Medium. 'I can no longer stand by in silence as Microsoft continues to facilitate Israel's ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people,' he wrote, citing internal documents that allegedly show the company began pitching its services to the Israeli military days after the October 7, 2023 attacks. 'Microsoft openly admitted to allowing the Israel Ministry of Defence 'special access to our technologies beyond the terms of our commercial agreements',' Lopez wrote in his email. 'Do you really believe that this 'special access' was allowed only once?'advertisementA recent report by Drop Site claims that the Israeli military has become one of Microsoft's top 500 global customers. In response to scrutiny, Microsoft recently published a blog post stating that it had conducted a third-party review and found 'no evidence' that its technology had been used to harm civilians in Gaza. However, Lopez dismissed the findings as 'non-transparent audits' conducted in part by Microsoft itself. He added: '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.'Lopez is not the only employee to confront leadership over Microsoft's involvement in the Gaza conflict. Last month, Vaniya Agrawal, a US-based employee, interrupted the company's 50th anniversary event in front of top executives including Satya Nadella, Steve Ballmer, and Bill Gates.'It is undeniable that Microsoft's Azure cloud offerings and AI developments form the technological backbone of Israel's automated apartheid and genocide systems,' she wrote in a public letter.Another engineer, Ibtihal Aboussad, disrupted a Microsoft AI event just a day earlier, calling out Microsoft's AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman with the words: 'Mustafa, shame on you.'