Microsoft president: IDF use of Azure “needs to be tested”

Last year, about fifty employees of Google, the franchisee of the Israeli government’s huge Nimbus computing project, stormed company offices in Sunnyvale, California and New York, including the office of Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud unit, and called on the company to stop working with Israel. A few days later, all of them were fired.

Yesterday, Microsoft president Brad Smith responded quite differently when employees protested against that company’s activity in Israel. A group of Microsoft employees and former employees burst into Smith’s office. After they were removed from there by police, Smith held a broadcast press conference in which he said, “I think the responsible step from us is clear in this kind of situation: to go investigate and get to the truth of how our services are being used,” and mentioned that earlier this month the company had begun an inquiry into a report in “The Guardian” that described the use of Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure system Azure to monitor Palestinians’ telephone calls. He said that some of what was reported “needs to be tested.”

The report on the “urgent external investigation” was published a few days ago. It relates to allegations that the IDF’s 8200 signals intelligence unit used Microsoft technology to store audio files and data from telephone calls by Palestinians in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip.

The demonstrators who stormed Smith’s office yesterday were from an anti-Israel group that set up a protest encampment on Microsoft’s campus last week, and previously held protests at Microsoft events and even disrupted the speech of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at the company’s annual conference earlier this year. Among the group’s organizers are current and former Microsoft employees Abdo Mohamed, Hossam Nasr, Anna Hattle, Joe Lopez, and Vaniya Agrawal.

Microsoft says that the examination of the use of the Azure cloud platform in Israel will be supervised by Washington DC-based law firm Covington & Burling. This is the second examination commissioned by Microsoft of the use of its technology by the IDF. The first was carried out by a previous “The Guardian” report containing similar allegations. At that time, Microsoft said that there was no evidence that the IDF had breached Azure’s terms of service or had been used to harm people in the Gaza Strip. Microsoft was informed in 2021 that its customer intended to transfer 70% of its data to the Microsoft cloud platform, but it is not clear whether the data in question could be of the kind that is the subject of the current reports, insofar as such data exist.

The report in “The Guardian” nevertheless raised the suspicion among senior people at Microsoft that some of its workers in Israel might have concealed information about the way the 8200 unit was using Azure when they were questioned in the investigation. They considered the possibility that the unit, described as an important and sensitive customer of the company, might have breached the terms of service and the company’s commitments on human rights.

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Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler, a senior fellow of the Israel Democracy Institute, told “Globes”: “This affair is not a matter of Microsoft versus 8200, but testimony to a deeper process in which the giant cloud computing companies are becoming de facto regulators of countries. The State of Israel can pass laws and talk about physical or digital sovereignty, but as soon as its data and systems are stored on the cloud of a global corporation, the decision whether to leave them there or to cut them off lies with the technology giants.”

Shwartz Altshuler recalls that this is not the first incident of its kind. “Amazon barred NSO from its cloud infrastructure after it was revealed how the company had used its services when it sold licenses to non-democratic countries or to entities that abused the licenses to monitor human rights activists, journalists, and regulators.”

The IDF stated in response: “Relationships between the IDF and the Ministry of Defense and civilian companies are formed on the basis of agreements drawn up and audited in accordance with the law. The IDF acts in accordance with international law in order to thwart terrorism and to maintain the security of the state and its residents.”

Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on August 27, 2025.

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