On Wednesday, April 17, 2024, Google terminated 28 employees following a series of protests over labor conditions and the company's contract to supply cloud computing and artificial intelligence services to the Israeli government and military, as per an internal memo reporters accessed.
This development occurred a day after the arrest of nine Google employees on trespassing charges Tuesday night. They had organized a sit-in at the company's offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California, including a demonstration in the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.
Employees involved in the New York and Sunnyvale sit-ins, who spoke to journalists on Wednesday, confirmed that they were barred from accessing their work accounts and offices during the protest, placed on official leave, and instructed to await contact from human resources before returning to work.
In a memo on Wednesday evening, Chris Rackow, Google's Vice President of Global Security, notified employees that the company had terminated the employment of twenty-eight workers implicated in the incidents. He stated that investigations would continue and further actions would be taken as necessary.
The arrests, broadcast live on Twitch by the participants, succeeded protests outside Google's offices in New York, Sunnyvale, and Seattle. These protests, which attracted hundreds, were organized by the "No Tech for Apartheid" group, focusing on Project Nimbus—a joint $1.2 billion contract between Google and Amazon to provide cloud computing services, AI tools, data centers, and other cloud infrastructure to the Israeli government and military.
