Microsoft Cuts Israel’s Cloud Access Over Their Surveillance of Gaza

By Jacob Weindling | September 25, 2025 | 3:27pm

Photo by No Azure for Apartheid

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Microsoft Cuts Israel’s Cloud Access Over Their Surveillance of Gaza

There is more news in the ongoing ostracization of Israel from civilized society while they lose the war for public opinion across the world, as Microsoft — a month after they fired four employees over barricading themselves in Microsoft President Brad Smith’s office as a protest against Microsoft’s complicity in Israel’s genocide of Gaza — has confirmed portions of The Guardian’s report on August 6th about how “Israel [is] relying on Microsoft cloud for expansive surveillance of Palestinians.” Israel’s goal reportedly was to surveil “a million calls an hour” and Microsoft helped them work towards it, per Microsoft.

“I want to let you know that Microsoft has ceased and disabled a set of services to a unit within the Israel Ministry of Defense (IMOD),” wrote Brad Smith in a blog post on Microsoft’s website today. “While our review is ongoing, we have found evidence that supports elements of The Guardian’s reporting. This evidence includes information relating to IMOD consumption of Azure storage capacity in the Netherlands and the use of AI services.”

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Microsoft initially said in May that they looked into it and they didn’t find evidence indicating that Israel was using their technologies to harm people. But post-Guardian report in August, all of a sudden, they “informed IMOD of Microsoft’s decision to cease and disable specified IMOD subscriptions and their services, including their use of specific cloud storage and AI services and technologies.” This year is really demonstrating the power of good journalism and its ability to affect change, because our capitalist giants cannot be trusted to do the right thing in any instance anymore.

Smith made no mention of the fired employees, or the 20 other current and former employees arrested during a protest on Microsoft’s campus on August 20th, just one week prior to the protest inside Smith’s office. Nor did he reference the Associated Press’s fairly damning, exhaustive and related report from back in February about Microsoft’s complicity in Israel’s genocide, nor The Guardian‘s report in January about how “Microsoft deepened ties with Israeli military to provide tech support during Gaza war,” nor any of the other scores of stories about Microsoft providing the digital infrastructure Israel needed and didn’t have in order to facilitate a genocide.

“The amount of data [Israel] stored on Microsoft servers doubled between [October 7th] and July 2024 to more than 13.6 petabytes,” reported the AP in February. “Roughly 350 times the digital memory needed to store every book in the Library of Congress.” Israel’s military has long called AI a “game-changer” for how they identify targets in this mass slaughter, and by all indications, that was and perhaps still is taking place on Microsoft servers. The word “Microsoft” appears 32 times across AP‘s report, and when you combine it with The Guardian forcing Microsoft to admit the protesters they ordered arrested were right, it all looks pretty damning for the third-largest company in the world.

This saga within Microsoft follows the same general pattern of the rest of the discourse in America over Israel’s genocide of Gaza since October 7th. Those of us not afraid to call it what it is have been chastised and lectured and called antisemites even though many Jews like me stand among us, right up until about now where public opinion has shifted (especially in the Democratic Party). Now Microsoft and Maersk and other giants around the world are concluding that business as usual with the globe’s most genocidal apartheid state actually does risk putting them in legal peril–assuming that laws may ever be real again in the authoritarian world these capitalist giants were more than happy to help usher in, both here and abroad.