A Microsoft engineer quits the company after 13 years of employment with the software giant, asserting that the company still sells cloud services to the Israeli military and that its leaders refuse to talk about the war in Gaza.
A Principal Software Engineer, Scott Sutfin-Glowski, said his colleagues at Microsoft on Thursday that this was the end of his time at the company this week.
He penned that “I can no longer accept enabling what may be the worst atrocities of our time.”
In the letter, he cited an Associated Press article dated in February that stated that the Israeli military had at least 635 Microsoft subscriptions, and that he had asserted that the overwhelming majority of them were active. Meanwhile, Microsoft refused to comment on this matter.
The exit announcement by Sutfin-Glowski was made a day after President Donald Trump reported that Israel and Hamas had agreed to the first phase in a peace plan, two years into the most recent conflict.
After citing the government officials, AP stated that the U.S. was deploying approximately 200 troops to Israel to assist in the ceasefire agreement. The concerns are escalating at Microsoft after this ongoing conflict.
Employees have been complaining about the company’s cloud business with the Israeli military for months; therefore, five employees have been terminated.
Microsoft announced in September that it had halted some of its services to a department within the Israeli Ministry of Defense without giving details.
That decision followed a report by The Guardian in August that said that the Israeli Defense Forces’ Unit 8200 had developed a system that could monitor phone calls by Palestinians.
Sutfin-Glowski reported that the company blocked communication lines that allowed the employees to raise their issues regarding the usage of Microsoft products by the Israeli military.
According to a statement from No Azure for Apartheid, employees and community members outside a building at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, on Thursday opened banners calling on the company to sever ties with Israel.
The group has been requesting Microsoft to listen to the over 1,500 employees who petitioned the company to support a ceasefire.
Sutfin-Glowski reported, “Today, the ceasefire in Gaza finally takes effect after two years of genocide, but the atrocities, human rights abuses, war crimes, apartheid, and occupation continue.”
