Microsoft fired four employees who broke into the office of company president Brad Smith earlier this week as part of a flurry of anti-Israel protests, CBS reported on Thursday.
Two individuals fired on Aug. 28 were terminated for “serious violations of established company policies and our code of conduct, including participating in recent on-site demonstrations that created significant safety concerns for our employees,” the tech giant said in a statement. Microsoft fired two other employees the day before.
The terminations come after police arrested seven people on Aug. 26 who had occupied the office in protest against the company’s business dealings with the Israel Defense Forces. The organizer, No Azure for Apartheid, said the employees, both current and former workers, in question entered the office to hold a “sit-in.”
The break-in was part of a string of activity that erupted last week at Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Wash., causing some Jewish employees to feel angry and abandoned, they told JNS.
Microsoft published a statement on Aug. 15 that said the tech company was “undertaking a formal review of allegations” that the IDF was using the company’s Azure cloud computing platform for mass surveillance of Palestinian civilians.
