Microsoft has revoked the Israeli military’s access to a software it used to store data on millions of phone calls by Palestinian civilians, according to a letter obtained by the Guardian.
In doing so, the company becoming the first U.S. tech giant to penalize Israel amid its war in Gaza —and following demands from pro-Palestinian activists.
The termination of the Israeli military’s access to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform comes a month after an investigation by three media companies on two continents revealed that Unit 8200, the military’s elite spy agency, had used the technology to conduct a mass surveillance program on Palestinians.
The investigation was published jointly by the Guardian, the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call.
“While our review is ongoing, we have at this juncture identified evidence that supports elements of the Guardian’s reporting,” wrote a senior Microsoft executive in a letter to Israel’s ministry of defense last week, according to the Guardian.
The executive told Israel officials that Microsoft “is not in the business of facilitating the mass surveillance of civilians” and alerted them that it would “disable” access to services that supported the surveillance program.
The joint investigation spurred protests at Microsoft’s U.S. headquarters and one of its European data centers. The protests dovetailed with the growing isolation of Israel as some of its strongest allies, including the European Union, move to sanction the country over its conduct in the Gaza offensive.
Earlier this month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged that the country faced a “sort of isolation” over its prosecution of the war in Gaza, adding that they must “develop our weapons industry.”
While Unit 8200 used its own surveillance abilities to collect the call data, it then relied on the Azure platform to analyze and segregate the information to aid its military campaign, according to the Guardian. The surveillance initially focused on Palestinians in the West Bank, but later expanded to monitoring civilians in Gaza to facilitate air strikes, the news outlets reported.
The trove of Palestinian call data obtained by Unit 8200 had amounted to as much as 8,000 terabytes, according to the Guardian, and was stored at a Microsoft datacenter in the Netherlands until it was moved out of the country days after the investigation was published.
Intelligence sources told the Guardian that Unit 8200 allegedly planned to transfer the data to the Amazon Web Services cloud platform, but neither the IDF or Amazon responded to the publication’s request for comment.
On Thursday, Microsoft’s vice-chair and president, Brad Smith, told staff that the company had “ceased and disabled a set of services to a unit within the Israel ministry of defense,” according to an email obtained by the Guardian.
“We do not provide technology to facilitate mass surveillance of civilians. We have applied this principle in every country around the world, and we have insisted on it repeatedly for more than two decades,” Smith continued.
Microsoft is not the only U.S. tech company to face internal pressure over its partnership with the Israeli military. In 2021, before the current offensive in Gaza began, a group of Jewish employees at Google signed a letter urging the company to terminate its contracts with Israeli entities, and in April 2024, Google fired 28 employees who staged a sit-in to protest a company deal to sell technology to Israel.
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