By Ayah Ali-Ahmad
Publication Date: 2025-11-19 18:30:00
He referred to cloud and AI services as “the bombs and bullets of the 21st century.”
“The Israeli military would not have been able to be as destructive, as deadly, as brutal in its genocide in Gaza, if it were not for the technology provided by Microsoft,” Nasr said.
Before the rally unfolded outside the conference center, there was a disruption inside — Microsoft employee Patrick Fort interrupted CEO Judson Althoff’s opening keynote speech and resigned in protest.
Fort, a senior software engineer who had been at Microsoft for seven years, worked on systems supporting the Azure platform. He said he sent a mass resignation email to his colleagues before standing up in the bleachers to shout at Althoff. He was then escorted out by personnel.
“I recognize that my work at Microsoft, my labor, is enabling the genocide in some small way,” Fort told KQED shortly after leaving the venue. “The only way I saw to effectively stop that was to leave.”
