A pro-Palestinian demonstration outside the Google offices in California/Reuters
Since the start of the war in Gaza on October 7, American technology companies have faced political protests by workers. The most prominent case is that of Google, where many employees strongly oppose the company's cooperation with the Israeli government, and staged protest strikes tonight (Wednesday) at two of the company's offices - in Sunnyvale, California and in New York - according to a report in the Washington Post.
The protests were directed against the "Nimbus" project, a joint contract between Google and Amazon worth $1.2 billion that provides cloud services and data centers to the Israeli government. Employees in Sunnyvale entered the office of Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, and promised to remain there until the company meets their demand: cancellation of the contract. At the headquarters in New York, employees gathered in a common place and refused to return to work.
The protests were held a day after pro-Palestinian activists blocked roads and the way to the airports Across the United States, in a coordinated series of demonstrations against Israel's fighting in the Gaza Strip and American military support for the country.
As you may recall, last month an employee was fired for lashing out at the company's CEO in Israel, Barak Regev, during a conference in New York. The employee, a Google cloud platform engineer, shouted at Regev that he "refuses to build technology that prevents genocide and apartheid", and was removed by security guards from the scene Google
has faced public pressure for its involvement in the Nimbos project, in which Google won alongside Amazon, with the signing of the contract worth 1.2 billion dollars. As part of the project, the two companies provide cloud services and computing infrastructure to the Israeli government.