ETHICS

Playing with fire

From Microsoft’s cloud servers to EA’s new owners in Riyadh, the industry is testing players’ consciences

Protesters splashed red paint across Microsoft’s Redmond HQ signage in May, accusing the company of being complicit in the mass surveillance and killing of civilians in the war in Gaza

No Azure For Apartheid

Getty, Joe Raedle

Jared Kushner and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman are the architects behind the $55 billion deal handing Saudi Arabia control of EA

Getty, Win McNamee

On the morning of September 25, Brad Smith, Microsoft’s vice-chair and president, sent an email to his employees around the world. In careful prose he announced that the company had “ceased and disabled a set of services to a unit within the Israel Ministry Of Defense”. The move followed an investigation by The Guardian, +972 Magazine and Local Call that found Israel’s cyber-intelligence unit, 8200, had used Microsoft’s Azure cloud to store and analyse intercepted Palestinian phone calls – “a million calls an hour”, in the unit’s own phrase. Investigators alleged that the technology helped identify targets for air strikes in Gaza and the West Bank, where Israel now stands accused by the United Nations of committing genocide.

The announcement marked a startling reversal. In an earlier statement, the company had said that, following both internal and external reviews, it had “found no evidence” that Microsoft’s technologies “have been used to target or harm people in the conflict in Gaza”, and rejected calls to sever its contracts with Israel. And, according to former Microsoft employees involved with the No Azure For Apartheid campaign group, the company had disciplined employees who spoke out against the company’s ties to the military. But, following a hurried internal review, Microsoft had been forced to concede that Unit 8200’s use of its systems violated its own terms of service. “We do not provide technology to facilitate mass surveillance of civilians,” Smith wrote.

Microsoft’s move was the first known instance of a US technology firm cutting services to the Israeli military since the war in Gaza began in October 2023 – a rare, but not unprecedented, moment of corporate defiance toward a government client. (Notably, Microsoft ended all business in Russia within months of the invasion of Ukraine, and divested from South Africa in the ’80s in protest of the country’s apartheid policies.) Yet the scope of this latest decision is limited. The suspension applies only to one military unit, not to the Israeli Defence Forces as a whole, which remains a major customer.