Microsoft President Brad Smith, left, speaks at a press conference on future visions for the development and application of artificial intelligence in education in North Rhine-Westphalia at the Representation of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia in Berlin on June 4, 2025. To his right is Hendrik Wüst (CDU), Minister President of North Rhine-Westphalia, in front of the sign “From coal to AI.”
Soeren Stache | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
Microsoft said Thursday that it has stopped providing certain services to a division of the Israeli Ministry of Defense. The company did not say which specific services it had stopped providing.
The decision comes after the software company investigated an August report from The Guardian saying the Israeli Defense Forces’ Unit 8200 had built a system for tracking Palestinians’ phone calls.
“While our review is ongoing, we have found evidence that supports elements of The Guardian’s reporting,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president and vice chair, wrote in an email to employees. “This evidence includes information relating to IMOD consumption of Azure storage capacity in the Netherlands and the use of AI services.”
Microsoft’s decision to stop providing those services follows pressure from employees who have protested Israel’s use of the company’s software as part of its invasion of Gaza. Over the last few weeks, Microsoft has fired five employees who participated in protests at company headquarters in Redmond, Washington.
The move comes a week after a United Nations commission said that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians with its invasion of Gaza.
Microsoft told Israeli defense officials that it had decided to disable cloud-based storage and artificial intelligence subscriptions the agency was using, Smith wrote. He said Microsoft does not look at customer data for the type of review it conducted, and he thanked the British newspaper for its reporting on the development.
“As employees, we all have a shared interest in privacy protection, given the business value it creates by ensuring our customers can rely on our services with rock solid trust,” Smith wrote.
On Thursday The Guardian reported that unnamed intelligence sources had said Unit 8200 was planning to migrate its supply of the phone calls to Amazon Web Services, the market-leading public cloud. AWS did not immediately comment.
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