Microsoft hired the provision of certain cloud services for a position of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, based on the results of an investigation of the company according to a news report that revealed that these services were used in controversial activities.
The company announced the decision on Thursday, September 25th, without naming the services concerned in detail. The investigation, which followed a report by the British newspaper “The Guardian” from last month, showed evidence that supported the elements of this report, according to which the 8200 of the Israeli army used the technology to create a system to pursue telephone calls from Palestinians.
In the details of the evidence that the investigation found, Brad Smith, the president of the company and deputy chairman of the board, wrote to the employee in an email: “While our review is still running, we have found evidence that support the elements of the Guardian report. This evidence contains information about the consumption of the Israeli Ministry of Defense at Speicherplatz on the Azure_Cloud computing platform of the company_ in the Netherlands and the use of AI services. “
Smith added that the company informed the defense authorities in Israel about his decision to suspend the cloud storage services and AI subscriptions that the agency used.
This decision is made in the context of increasing pressure from the company’s employees who protested against the use of Microsoft software by Israel in its military operations in the Gaza Strip. In a related development, the text reported that Microsoft has released five employees in the past few weeks because they took part in protests in the company’s headquarters.
Just a week after this step, a UN Committee announced that “Israel committed genocide of the Palestinians” during the war.
In his message, Smith emphasized that the review process did not include the company’s inspection of personal customer data and said: “As an employee, we all have a common interest in protecting the privacy, in view of the business value that we get into our services by guaranteeing our customers’ trust.”
He also thanked the British newspaper for her report, which referred to this development.
On the other hand, in her report on Thursday, “The Guardian” reported that the Israeli unit is planning 8200 to provide its telephone calls to the competing platform “Amazon Web Services“To shift that the leading public cloud is on the market.
