Video of Microsoft employee disrupting Satya Nadella’s keynote speech goes viral
Footage of a Microsoft employee disrupting CEO Satya Nadella’s keynote speech has been widely circulated online.
Footage of a Microsoft employee disrupting CEO Satya Nadella’s keynote speech has been widely circulated online. Joe Lopez, a Microsoft firmware engineer, stood up during the company’s Build developer conference in Seattle, Washington while Nadella was onstage.
The Microsoft employee’s protest
Lopez interrupted Satya Nadella with a pro-Palestine message. Standing up on his chair, he yelled, “Satya, how about you show how Microsoft is killing Palestinians. How about you show how Israeli war crimes are powered by Azure?”
According to a report in The Verge, Lopez had spent four years working on parts of Microsoft’s cloud-computing platform, Azure.
The pro-Palestine protestor was immediately escorted out by security staff at the Seattle conference, but not before a former Google worker stood up to join him. “Free Palestine, I’m a former Google worker and all tech workers…” the ex-employee was heard yelling in footage of the protest shared by No Azure for Apartheid.
The video has gone viral with over 8 lakh views on Instagram in one day.
A letter to leadership
In an email sent after he disrupted Nadella’s keynote address, Lopez said his decision to protest stemmed from his refusal to stay silent as “Microsoft continues to facilitate Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.”
“Like many of you, I have been watching the ongoing genocide in Gaza in horror. I have been shocked by the silence, inaction, and callousness of world leaders as Palestinian people are suffering, losing their lives and their homes while they plead for the rest of the world to pay attention and act,” he wrote.
This protest comes barely weeks after Microsoft fired two employees for staging a similar protest at the company’s 50th anniversary celebration. Lopez, in fact, mentioned the two women in his letter, writing: “I saw Ibtihal and Vaniya’s disruption of Microsoft’s 50th anniversary on April 4 and was shocked to hear the words coming from their mouths. Microsoft is killing kids? Is my work killing kids?”
You can read the full text of his letter here.
