Microsoft Fires Software Engineers Who Disrupted 50th Anniversary Event To Protest Israel
These two engineers should look on the bright side. They can now devote themselves full-time to activism and protests.
Microsoft has fired two software engineers who objected to the Israeli military using the company’s artificial intelligence products. These engineers chose the company’s 50th anniversary event to voice their protests, so it’s probably safe to assume that played a role in the decision.
🚨BREAKING: Microsoft Fires Anti-Israel Engineers Who Disrupted Anniversary Party
Microsoft terminated the jobs of the employees who protested at company events Friday over the Israeli military’s use of Microsoft’s AI. Ibtihal Aboussad and Vaniya Agrawal were terminated today. pic.twitter.com/DtM8yQ3ewJ
— Shelley G (@ShelleyGldschmt) April 7, 2025
From CNBC:
Microsoft terminates jobs of engineers who protested use of AI products by Israel’s military
Microsoft terminated the employment of two software engineers who protested at company events Friday over the Israeli military’s use of the company’s artificial intelligence products, according to documents viewed by CNBC.
Ibtihal Aboussad, a software engineer in the company’s AI division who is based in Canada, was fired Monday over “just cause, wilful misconduct, disobedience or wilful neglect of duty,” according to one of the documents.
Another Microsoft software engineer, Vaniya Agrawal, had said she would resign from the company on April 11. But Microsoft terminated her role Monday, according to an internal message viewed by CNBC. The company wrote that it “has decided to make your resignation immediately effective today.”
Both employees chose Microsoft’s 50th anniversary event to publicly voice their criticism.
What Microsoft had hoped would be a celebratory period has turned into a brutal few days for the company, which is being hit, along with the rest of the market, by President Donald Trump’s widespread tariffs.
More from the Associated Press:
The protests began Friday when Microsoft software engineer Ibtihal Aboussad walked up to a stage where an executive was announcing new product features and a long-term vision for Microsoft’s AI ambitions.
“You claim that you care about using AI for good but Microsoft sells AI weapons to the Israeli military,” Aboussad shouted at Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman. “Fifty-thousand people have died and Microsoft powers this genocide in our region.”
The protest forced Suleyman to pause his talk, which was livestreamed from Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Washington. Among the participants at the 50th anniversary of Microsoft’s founding were co-founder Bill Gates and former CEO Steve Ballmer.
Listen to the audience groan as Agrawal begins her protest.
This is Vaniya Agrawal, the software engineer who disrupted Microsoft's 50th anniversary celebrations at its headquarters. She attacked Satya Nadella, Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates for investing in Israel: "Shame on you all. You’re all hypocrites. 50,000 Palestinians in Gaza have… pic.twitter.com/TNgYt5uJB8
— Rakesh Krishnan Simha (@ByRakeshSimha) April 8, 2025
And here’s the other one.
A software engineer in Microsoft’s AI division interrupted the company’s 50th anniversary celebration on Friday, protesting the Israeli military’s use of the company’s AI products.
“You have blood on your hands,” the engineer said. “All of Microsoft has blood on its hands.” pic.twitter.com/1vip8pxmUG
— 🔻agitprop & absurdity🔻 (@agtprpnabsrdty) April 7, 2025
These two engineers should look on the bright side. They can now devote themselves full-time to activism and protests. It might not be as lucrative as being an engineer for Microsoft, but it’s clearly their real passion.
Featured image via Twitter video.
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Comments
In the words of that famous philosopher, Larry the cable guy, “you can’t fix stupid.”
Or according to the philosopher Jagger–“you can’t always get what you want”.
But you can muffle it with Duct tape….
Silence is golden.
Duct tape is silver.
Borrowing
Ron White but your point stands.
Git’er done.
Oops.
Nothing like biting the hand that feeds you
Actually, that was Ron White who said that. And its true. Ignorance can be cured with education, stupidity is terminal.
I’m sure those fired are shocked.
Are there an AI developers interested in hiring these newly available engineers?
They should also fire those responsible for Windows 11.
How about Windows 3.1. DOS was so much better. Kinda like OS/2
The gold standard is backwards compatibility.
It depends on whose “gold” you’re talking about. Apple makes much gold by dropping support for old hardware.
Loved Windows XP. Stable, did everything I needed it to do, highly customizable. Each successive version of Windows since then has been dumbed-down, with Microsoft hiding or eliminating access to advanced features, while at the same time bloating the OS with useless crap, half of which can’t be removed without affecting other functions.
I am posting from XP in fact. And the help/about link on my news reader says
Netscape Navigator(tm)
Version 2.02
Copyright @ 1994-1995 Netscape Communications Corporation. All rights reserved
I actually need XP because it runs 32=bit Cygwin, a clone of UNIX, which makes windows tolerable, and better than Linux because it has /dev/clipboard as a device.
I’m trying to imagine what you do for malware protection and large memory. I use macOS, which is BSD Unix with Applesauce all over it.
I go back to 2.1 all the way to the current 11, As a non-tech who relied on his computer a lot, my favorite is still Windows XP.
Excuse me, I was busy, converting one of my computers over to Linux Mint. What was that you were saying?
Linux has the compiler problem that it doesn’t accept classical K&R C code any longer.
Strong typing is for weak minds.
Automatic spark advance is for ignorant drivers.
Self-starters for engines? For weaklings.
Synchromesh is for (affectionate name for “cats”).
In-door toilets? A passing fad.
There are simple things you can’t do with strong typing, like call a function that returns null or a pointer to the next function to call
while(x=(*x)());
how do you declare x? The type problem is that it never terminates in a base variable.
To rhardin:
I am not a programmer, ergo, that means nothing to me, either knowing what it is, or caring.
I am switching over because Windows 11 is now giving me constant dings to try or subscribe to their gaming, or their office suite (which I just ditched due to “helpful” popups), and just a general feeling of clutter.
XP was the star version of Windows, 7 was quite good. But, since 8 it just gets worse and worse.
My programming experience lays in Turbo Pascal and COBOL, and some ladder logic in industrial control. Laugh at me all you want; I care not. The K&R manual did one thing: It drove me away from “C” because their layouts were sloppy (and still are), and was clear as mud.
And, what is Strong typing?
I also was a satisfied user of Borland Pascal with Objects; felt it was much better than C.
I like strongly typed variables, less likely to have strange unexpected results in “corner cases”.
The K&R C spec allowed C compilers to handle accumulator operations in whatever order was most convenient for the target hardware; thus making C source code non-portable across platforms (unless you used extravagant quantities of parenthesis in your source code)..
The Case statement in C encourages spaghetti code.
C tried to implement every feature of PDP11 assembly language, all in one line! In practice this means a high percentage of whatever is written in a statement will result in a valid statement, even if you made errors in constructing the statement. In Pascal it is more likely that your error in crafting a statement will result in a syntax error from the compiler, making debugging much easier and faster.
As I recall the non strongly typed variables coupled with the way the compiler would help you when using these variables would lead to unexpected “side effects”.
I ran into these contrasts when writing C for TI DSP’s (TMS320Cxx) after writing Pascal with objects code for a digital filter design program running on PC’s.
What is the problem, you can’t cast in it? Or what?
There’s no legal declaration for it in strongly typed versions. It’s easy in K&R C, just cast it pointer to function returning pointer to void and all the declarations work.
Well…. So much for “learning to code”…
Maybe they could become rare earth minerals miners?
Or blueberry pickers.
Put a torch in her hand, bronze her, and ship her back to France.
I changed my mind, Replace the torch with a can of soup.
Henry: the perfect soup would be Vichy Sauce! (spelling intentional).
Are they resident aliens? Hmmm, let’s look at those visas.
.
In other news, Microsoft is 50 years old.
How much longer til they get it right?
I hear that some patches will receive patches to their patches patches.
Folks can knock Apple all they want, but, at least when they made a big jump in how their OS was built, folks got notice, Rosetta extended the life of OS9 apps, and they started fresh.
Windows is such a hash of this-and-that, that the fact it runs at all is nothing short of a miracle.
You picked the wrong week to praise post-Jobs Apple. Their 15.4 upgrade installation process is actually bricking user machines.
Oh, dear….
I don’t think a single Microsoft employee has a comprehensive understanding of how the Windows authentication system works. It’s like the small house to which 57 additions were added over a century. All of the designers and implementers have moved on. The current maintainers can’t change anything because their customers’ applications will stop working.
Houses are actually easier:
The Adam Keeling House, the oldest continually occupied home in North America (c. 1700)…
What baffles me is why these fine Muslims are being forced to accept fat salaries and cushy living conditions at Microsoft instead of being allowed to tote a rifle in defense of “their region” against the bloody genocide in Gaza, which has killed 50,000…. no, I mean 100,000 little babies and innocent children… maybe its 250,000 tiny children and old people in hospitals.
“From the river to the sea, I will protest pointlessly!”
“All of Microsoft has blood on its hands.”
Really? That means her too. Why was she even working there?
DEI hire.
…who were immediately hired by google
recall Google fire the terrorists who did the same thing there.
Only after it was all public.
It’s the militant woke attacking the wealthy woke. No doubt they will receive generous severance sums.
I worked at MSFT for a number of years.
Great performance reviews all the way through.
Until one team I was on had a req open for a new head. They hired two people. One internal (white female) and one external (black male).
The same week the black guy started, the manager started laying paper on me. She pulled me into a meeting to tell me people (people she trusts, but would not name) just don’t like me and that I should start looking for a new role. A few days later she starts hanging paper on me for nickel and dime things.
My bad for not documenting this and lawyering up. There were other factors (like massive co employment fraud) in play too. Net net if anyone wants to sue that company….. PLEASE subpoena me!!!!!
Andy: I am not familiar with the term “co employment” or the fraud that goes with it. Please explain? Thanks!
I quit 3 days after the “off the record” meeting- as I wasn’t allowing for a single day of opportunity of hanging paper.
The off the record meeting was a slimy as you can possibly imagine.
Who are the ones with blood on their hands again?
You know you’ve narrowly escaped totalitarianism and come out the other side when Microsoft employees are again free to groan publicly at the tiresome agitation of tendentious, mouthy, liberal “protestors.”
High tech is full of these green-red alliance clowns and they rule the roost with dissension not tolerated. These idiots made the mistake of embarrassing the company leadership and criticizing the company, That was their sin.
Waiting for a circuit court judge somewhere to tell Microsoft they must rehire these people.
And Microsoft’s legal team telling the judge to sit on it and do what Oliver did.
Gazans have more than blood on their hands, try war crimes against civilians.
They were probably affirmative action hires, too.
Sooo …. Microsoft is genocidal …. so why are you working there ?
Isn’t this a bit like protesting Nazi Germany while being in the SS ?
Happy & content w/Windows 10. Loathing the idea of being forced into Windows 11
Well, they got the headlines they wanted. It’s not like Microsoft is some conservative corporation. More like a bunch of lefty radicals.
Two DEI hires gone. Productivity jumps on their teams.
They can take some solace in they stood by their misguided principles.
Odd, I haven’t read or seen anything about this in the MSM.
Not surprising.
Too busy fighting over their throne in the WH pressroom.