Microsoft employees say emails with ‘Gaza,’ ‘Palestine,’ or ‘genocide’ won’t send

Published

3 months ago

May 22, 2025

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Security officers block entrance doors after pro-Palestinian protesters attempted to enter the Microsoft Build conference at the Seattle Convention Center Arch building in Seattle, Washington on May 19, 2025.

Jason Redmond | Afp | Getty Images

Microsoft employees are concerned that the company has been blocking Outlook emails containing the words “Palestine,” “Gaza,” “genocide,” “apartheid” and “IOF off Azure,” even if they’re including those terms in an HR complaint, according to screenshots, recordings and documents viewed by CNBC.

Employees said they started noticing the change Wednesday just before noon PST, batch-testing emails with the terms in question and emails without them. Only the ones without such terms appeared in their outboxes, suggesting those containing the terms weren’t received, according to materials viewed by CNBC and three sources familiar with the matter.

The people asked not to be named in order to speak freely.

One employee with the word “apartheid” in their email signature, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said they sent a typical work-related email around 11:30 a.m. PST on Wednesday successfully. The person said that just before noon on the same day, their emails wouldn’t go through — ostensibly due to their email signature.

On internal message boards, messages seen by CNBC showed employees asking why their emails with the word “Israel” may go through but not the word “Palestine,” as well as “Gaza” and other terms. Modifications like “P4lestine” did go through, according to their tests.

One employee asked on an internal message board, “Is the company abandoning the inclusivity initiative or is this only targeting Palestinians and their allies?”

The Verge was first to report on the potential email block.

In a message seen by CNBC, Frank Shaw, Microsoft’s chief communications officer, responded to an employee post, writing: “To clarify, emails are not being blocked or censored, unless they are being sent to large numbers of random distribution groups. There can be a small delay and the team is working to make that as short as possible.”

“Over the past couple of days, a number of emails have been sent to tens of thousands of employees across the company and we have taken measures to try and reduce those emails to those that have not opted in,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement.

But employees told CNBC that even when they attempted to send relatively mundane, solely work-related emails to small groups of colleagues, the emails still didn’t go through if they contained those terms.

Another employee who spoke on condition of anonymity said that when they attempted to send a report to HR containing one of the terms in question, they did not receive the auto-response typically confirming receipt until more than 24 hours later. The message also didn’t show up in the online HR portal until more than 24 hours later.

Some emails were delivered after being delayed by seven hours or more, according to the group No Azure for Apartheid. The group suggested manual reviews of such emails were taking place before they were delivered.

Microsoft protests

Microsoft has seen a growing number of protests at recent events over the Israeli military’s use of the company’s AI products. Protesters have also sent emails to the company’s executives outlining their concerns.

At Microsoft’s Build developer conference in Seattle this week, protesters interrupted executives during keynote speeches and sessions.

On Tuesday, protesters interrupted the Microsoft Build session on best AI security practices, singling out Sarah Bird, Microsoft’s head of responsible AI, who was co-hosting the session with Microsoft AI security chief Neta Haiby.

Haiby was formerly a member of the Israel Defense Forces, according to a Tumblr page viewed by CNBC.

“Sarah Bird, you are whitewashing the crimes of Microsoft in Palestine,” Hossam Nasr, an organizer with the group No Azure for Apartheid, said.

Nasr was one of the Microsoft employees terminated last year after planning a vigil for Palestinians killed in Gaza.

Earlier on Tuesday during another Microsoft Build session, an unnamed Palestinian tech worker disrupted a speech by Jay Parikh, Microsoft’s head of CoreAI.

“Jay, you are complicit in the genocide in Gaza,” the tech worker, who did not wish to share their name for fear of retaliation, said. “My people are suffering because of you. How dare you. How dare you talk about AI when my people are suffering. Cut ties with Israel.”

The worker then called to “free Palestine” and said, “No Azure for apartheid,” a nod to the group and its petition.

A demonstrator is removed from the audience as they interrupt a presentation by Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella at the Microsoft Build 2025 conference in Seattle, Washington on May 19, 2025.

Jason Redmond | AFP | Getty Images

On Monday, Microsoft software engineer Joe Lopez interrupted CEO Satya Nadella’s keynote speech onstage, saying, “Satya, how about you show them how Microsoft is killing Palestinians? How about you show them how Israeli war crimes are powered by Azure?”

Lopez was later fired, according to a document viewed by CNBC that stated the reason as, “misconduct resulting in the violation of both company policy and our expectations of a respectful workplace.”

The document said Lopez would be ineligible to return to Microsoft as an employee, contractor, or in any other capacity, including an employee of a Microsoft partner, customer or other third party.

At Microsoft’s 50th anniversary event last month, two Microsoft software engineers publicly protested the use of the company’s AI by the Israeli military during executive presentations. The roles of both employees, Ibtihal Aboussad and Vaniya Agrawal, were terminated soon after, according to documents viewed by CNBC.

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Instagram’s map feature spurs user backlash over geolocation privacy concerns

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3 hours ago

August 8, 2025

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Instagram's map feature spurs user backlash over geolocation privacy concerns

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The launch of an Instagram feature that details users’ geolocation data illicited backlash from social media users on Thursday.

Meta debuted the Instagram Map tool on Wednesday, pitching the feature as way to “stay up-to-date with friends” by letting users share their “last active location.” The tool is akin to Snapchat’s Snap Map feature that lets people see where their friends are posting from.

Although Meta said in a blog post that the feature’s “location sharing is off unless you opt in,” several social media users said in posts that they were worried that was not the case.

“I can’t believe Instagram launched a map feature that exposes everyone’s location without any warning,” said one user who posted on Threads, Meta’s micro-blogging service.

Another Threads user said they were concerned that bad actors could exploit the map feature by spying on others.

“Instagram randomly updating their app to include a maps feature without actually alerting people is so incredibly dangerous to anyone who has a restraining order and actively making sure their abuser can’t stalk their location online…Why,” said the user in a Threads post.

Instagram chief Adam Mosseri responded to the complaints on Threads, disputing the notion that the map feature is exposing people’s locations against their will.

“We’re double checking everything, but so far it looks mostly like people are confused and assume that, because they can see themselves on the map when they open, other people can see them too,” Mosseri wrote on Thursday. “We’re still checking everything though to make sure nobody shares location without explicitly deciding to do so, which, by the way, requires a double consent by design (we ask you to confirm after you say you want to share).”

Still, some Instagram users claimed that that their locations were being shared despite not opting in to using the map feature.

“Mine was set to on and shared with everyone in the app,” said a user in a Threads post. “My location settings on my phone for IG were set to never. So it was not automatically turned off for me.

A Meta spokesperson reiterated Mosseri’s comments in a statement and said “Instagram Map is off by default, and your live location is never shared unless you choose to turn it on.”

“If you do, only people you follow back — or a private, custom list you select — can see your location,” the spokesperson said.

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Tesla exec leading development of chip tech and Dojo supercomputer is leaving company

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4 hours ago

August 7, 2025

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Tesla exec leading development of chip tech and Dojo supercomputer is leaving company

Christina Locopo | CNBC

Tesla’s vice president of hardware design engineering, Pete Bannon, is leaving the company after first joining in 2016 from Apple, CNBC has confirmed.

Bannon was leading the development of Tesla’s Dojo supercomputer and reported directly to Musk. Bloomberg first reported on Bannon’s departure, and added that Musk ordered his team to shut down, with engineers in the group getting reassigned to other initiatives.

Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Since early last year, Musk has been trying to convince shareholders that Tesla, his only publicly traded business, is poised to become an an artificial intelligence and robotics powerhouse, and not just an electric vehicle company.

A centerpiece of the transformation was Dojo, a custom-built supercomputer designed to process and train AI models drawing on the large amounts of video and other data captured by Tesla vehicles.

Tesla’s focus on Dojo and another computing cluster called Cortex were meant to improve the company’s advanced driver assistance systems, and to enable Musk to finally deliver on his promise to turn existing Teslas into robotaxis.

On Tesla’s earnings call in July, Musk said the company expected its newest version of Dojo to be “operating at scale sometime next year, with scale being somewhere around 100,000 H-100 equivalents,” referring to a supercomputer built using Nvidia’s state of the art chips.

Tesla recently struck a $16.5 billion deal with Samsung to produce more of its own A16 chips with the company domestically.

Tesla is running a test Robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, and a related car service in San Francisco. In Austin, the company’s vehicles require a human safety supervisor in the front passenger seat ready to intervene if necessary. In San Francisco, the car service is operated by human drivers, though invited users can hail a ride through a “Tesla Robotaxi” app.

On the earnings call, Musk faced questions about how he sees Tesla and his AI company, xAI, keeping their distance given that they could be competing against one another for AI talent.

Musk said the companies “are doing different things.” He said, “xAI is doing like terabyte scale models and multi-terabyte scale models.” Tesla uses “100x smaller models,” he said, with the automaker focused on “real-world AI,” for its cars and robots and xAI focused on developing software that strives for “artificial super intelligence.”

Musk also said that some engineers wouldn’t join Tesla because “they wanted to work on AGI,” one reason he said he formed a new company.

Tesla has experienced an exodus of top talent this year due to a combination of job terminations and resignations. Milan Kovac, who was Tesla’s head of Optimus robotics engineering, departed, as did David Lau, a vice president of software engineering, and Omead Afshar, Musk’s former chief of staff.

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Omada Health beats on revenue in first earnings report since IPO

Published

7 hours ago

August 7, 2025

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Omada Health beats on revenue in first earnings report since IPO

The Omada Health logo is displayed on a smartphone screen.

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Omada Health reported quarterly results for the first time since its IPO in June.

Here’s how the company did based on average analysts’ estimates compiled by LSEG:

Loss: Loss per share of 24 cents.
Revenue: $61 million vs. $55.2 million expected

The virtual care company’s revenue increased 49% in its second quarter from $41.21 million a year earlier. The company reported a net loss of $5.31 million, or a 24-cent loss per share, compared to a net loss of $10.69 million, or $1.40 loss per share, during the same period last year.

“We believe our Q2 performance reflects Omada’s ability to capture tailwinds in cardiometabolic care, to effectively commercialize our GLP-1 Care Track, and to leverage advances in artificial intelligence for the benefit of our members,” Omada CEO Sean Duffy said in a release.