Google has reportedly fired 28 employees over their participation in a 10-hour sit-in at the search giant’s offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California, to protest the company’s business ties with the Israel government.
The protesting staffers, who had donned traditional Arab head scarves as they stormed and occupied the office of a top executive in California on Tuesday, were terminated late Wednesday after an internal investigation, Google vice president of global security Chris Rackow said in a companywide memo, the New York Post reported.
“They took over office spaces, defaced our property, and physically impeded the work of other Googlers,” Rackow wrote in the memo obtained by The Post.
Protesters have demanded that Google pull out of a $1.2 billion “Project Nimbus” contract
In New York, protesters had occupied the 10th floor of Google’s offices in the Chelsea section of Manhattan as part of a protest that also extended to the company’s offices in Seattle for what it called “No Tech for Genocide Day of Action”, the report said.
The fired staffers are affiliated with a group called ‘No Tech For Apartheid’, which has been critical of Google’s response to the Israel-Hamas war.
The group had posted several videos and livestreams of the protests on its X account — including the exact moment that employees were issued final warnings and arrested by local police for trespassing.
The protesters have demanded that Google pull out of a $1.2 billion “Project Nimbus” contract — in which Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services provide cloud-computing and artificial intelligence services for the Israeli government and military.
Critics at the company raised concerns that the technology would be weaponized against Palestinians in Gaza.
The impacted workers blasted Google over the firings in a statement shared by No Tech For Apartheid spokesperson Jane Chung.
“This evening, Google indiscriminately fired 28 workers, including those among us who did not directly participate in yesterday’s historic, bicoastal 10-hour sit-in protests,” the workers said in the statement, the Post report said.
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