Nearly two weeks ago, Israel was accused of using Microsoft Azure’s cloud infrastructure to conduct mass surveillance of Palestinian phone calls, according to a joint investigation by The Guardian, +972 Magazine and Local Call. Late last week, Microsoft finally issued an official statement to The Guardian saying it had launched an investigation to confirm these serious allegations.
The investigation will be conducted by law firm Covington & Burling, with Microsoft insisting that Azure’s use of storing phone call data files obtained through widespread or mass surveillance of civilians in Gaza and the West Bank is prohibited by its terms of service.
The Israeli spying system has been carried out by Unit 8200 since 2022, with the data collected later used to help carry out airstrikes and plan military operations in Gaza and the West Bank.
In the leaked documents, recordings of Palestinian phone calls were stored in Azure data centers located in the Netherlands and Ireland. In the Dutch database alone, over 200 million hours of audio recordings were stored, taking up 11,500 TB of storage space.
This is the second external investigation conducted by Microsoft. In May, the first investigation found no evidence that Azure and artificial intelligence (AI) technology was being used by Israel to harm Gazans. The first investigation was conducted after Microsoft was criticized for having a contract to provide cloud services to Israel worth $133 million.
The pressure on Microsoft has increased after reports from The Guardian, +972 Magazine and Local Call were published. Microsoft is among the companies included in the list of the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement due to their involvement with the Zionist regime which is actively committing genocide in Palestine. The BDS movement has caused huge losses to Starbucks and McDonald’s, forcing the closure of restaurants in Muslim-majority countries such as Malaysia.