They denounced a contract between their company and the Israeli army and government. Google fired 28 of its employees who took part in a demonstration on Tuesday, accusing them of having prevented their colleagues from going to their workplace.
Several dozen people gathered in front of Google offices in Sunnyvale (California), and took over offices in Seattle and New York. Some occupied the Sunnyvale office of the general director of Google Cloud (a subsidiary dedicated to remote computing), Thomas Kurian, for several hours.
They demanded the cancellation of a $1.2 billion contract, called Project Nimbus, for remote computing services (cloud) provided by Google and Amazon to the Israeli army and government. Some of the demonstrators held up signs using the font and colors of the famous Google logo, substituting the word "genocide", in reference to the Palestinian civilian victims of Israel's offensive in Gaza.
“Not intended for sensitive tasks”
In October 2021, the British daily The Guardian published an article by employees of Amazon and Google demanding the withdrawal of the two companies from the Nimbus project. They claimed to have nearly 400 signatories and justified their anonymity by “fear of reprisals”.
“These protests are part of a long-running campaign by a group of organizations and individuals, most of whom do not work within Google,” a spokesperson for the group said. Regarding the “small number” of employees who entered the premises, “physically obstructing the work of other employees and preventing them from accessing our spaces constitutes a clear violation of our rules”, continued the spokesperson, who confirmed that 28 protesting employees had been fired.
The spokesperson reiterated that the Nimbus project was “not intended for highly sensitive, classified or military tasks related to weapons or intelligence services”.