Google employees protesting the company’s ties to the government of Israel staged sit-ins at the company’s offices in New York City and Sunnyvale, Calif., on Tuesday morning.
The group in Sunnyvale have occupied the office of Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, and have been live-streaming the demonstration since on Twitch at a channel called “notech4apartheid.” As of 7:00 p.m. PST, their live stream remains uninterrupted.
However, the group reports that the employees in New York were arrested around 6:45 p.m. PST.
Google employees also staged protests at several other locations, including Seattle.
Representatives for Google did not respond to a request for comment from TheWrap.
The employees are demanding that Google pull out of Project Nimbus, the cloud computing service it provides Israeli government agencies in partnership with Amazon as part of a contract worth $1.2 billion.
Nimbus was controversial when the project was announced in 2021 — Google employees in particular have repeatedly pushed back against the deal, and both companies faced attempted stockholder revolts over it in 2022. At Google, the uproar over Nimbus became more intense following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and Israel’s subsequent military retaliation against Gaza.
In December, employees staged a “die-in” at one of Google’s offices in San Francisco. In March, a Google cloud programmer who disrupted a tech conference to protest Nimbus was fired. Intra-company protests have increased in frequency and intensity since then.
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