Technology

Microsoft has fired two employees who organized an unauthorized vigil at the company’s headquarters

But they contended that Thursday’s event was similar to other Microsoft-sanctioned employee giving campaigns

Seems like employer approval is an important piece.

But I think the most interesting part of the article is

Nasr said his firing was disclosed on social media by the watchdog group Stop Antisemitism more than an hour before he received the call from Microsoft. The group didn’t immediately respond Friday to a request for comment on how it learned about the firing.

To add some more context. Microsoft (and a lot of tech companies) have a relatively big presence in Israel, and that includes a lot of Israeli employees and acquired business.

Why would Microsoft fire an employee for holding a vigil, it's not like they ...

...called “No Azure for Apartheid”

Oh. Thanks for drawing attention to this, Microsoft! I appreciate that they're so willing to invoke the Streisand Effect.

I hope those employees land somewhere where they build something that costs Microsoft a lot of profit.

IBM provided business machines (internationally, even) to Nazi Germany, probably a big help in bureaucratically processing those millions of murders they were doing. I can't (or perhaps, "won't" is truer) imagine how much cloud compute a modern genocide requires.

Isn't it punishment enough having to use Azure? It's worse than having to use Google Cloud...