During a keynote speech in New York on Monday from the managing director of Google’s Israel business, an employee in the company’s cloud division protested publicly, proclaiming “I refuse to build technology that powers genocide.”
The Google Cloud engineer was subsequently fired, CNBC has learned, marking another dark moment for Google, which has been thrust into an escalating number of political and cultural conflicts in recent years and has struggled to quell employee dissent.
There was more internal controversy this week, also tied to the crisis in Gaza.
Ahead of an International Women’s Day Summit in Silicon Valley on Thursday, Google’s employee message board was hit with an influx of staffer comments about the company’s military contracts with Israel. The online forum, which was going to be used to help inform what questions were asked of executives at the event, was shut down for what a spokesperson described to CNBC as “divisive content that is disruptive to our workplace.”
Google’s role as a provider of technology to militaries in the U.S. and abroad has been a source of workforce consternation since at least 2018, when employees protested a Defense Department contract called Project Maven. Then came controversy surrounding Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion artificial intelligence and computing services agreement among Google, Amazon Web Services and the Israeli government and military that began in 2021.
That outrage has spread to a host of other issues, often leaving CEO Sundar Pichai on the defensive when confronted by employees at company events.
The escalation of the Middle East conflict over the past five months has increased the tension level at Google even further. In October, Hamas launched multipronged and deadly attacks on Israel, leading to a military response that’s killed at least 30,000 Palestinians, with many more injured and facing starvation, according to the Palestinian enclave’s Health Ministry.
In recent weeks, more than 600 Google workers…
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