Nine Google workers were arrested for trespassing in New York City and Sunnyvale, California on Tuesday night after an hours-long sit-in protest against their company’s contracts with Israel, a spokesperson from No Tech For Apartheid tells Gizmodo. Google says it has cut the protestors’ access to their offices and work accounts, and placed these employees on administrative leave.
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“Physically impeding other employees’ work and preventing them from accessing our facilities is a clear violation of our policies, and we will investigate and take action,” said a Google spokesperson in an email to Gizmodo Wednesday. “These employees were put on administrative leave and their access to our systems was cut. After refusing multiple requests to leave the premises, law enforcement was engaged to remove them to ensure office safety.”
The New York Police Department confirmed to Gizmodo that four protestors were arrested for trespassing in Google’s New York City headquarters on Tuesday night. The Sunnyvale Police Department did not immediately respond to calls made outside of normal business hours. A spokesperson for the protestors says all nine Google workers have been released from custody as of Wednesday morning.
“We’ve tried sending petitions to leadership but they’ve gone ignored,” said Hasan Ibraheem, a Google software engineer arrested on Tuesday in an emailed statement to Gizmodo. “We will make sure they can’t ignore us anymore. We will make as much noise as possible.”
The Google workers protested their company’s $1.2 billion Project Nimbus contract, which supplies AI and cloud computing services to the Israeli government and military. The sit-ins lasted for hours, drawing large crowds outside of Google’s headquarters for bystanders to protest the company’s alleged role in the Israel and Palestine war.
No Tech for Apartheid says they’ve faced extreme opposition within Google, but they faced new hostility from online members of the tech community on Wednesday. On X, many revolted against these protesting employees, calling this the latest “woke fiasco.”
“This company is literally overrun by employee mobs,” said Marc Andreessen, cofounder of Andreeseen Horowitz, in a tweet on Tuesday.
“All these entitled brats should be fired on the spot,” said Chaya Raichick, creator of LibsOfTikTok, in another tweet.
“This is what happens when you are a DEI company,” said another.
The nine employees placed on administrative leave are the latest to face penalty for protesting Google’s contracts with Israel. Last month, a 23-year-old Google software engineer, Eddie Hatfield, was fired for disrupting an executive’s presentation and screaming “No tech for apartheid!” at an Israeli tech conference. Hatfield told Gizmodo on Tuesday that “we’ll have to wait and see” whether more protests will follow these sit-ins.
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