Microsoft monitors and deletes employee emails containing the word "Palestine."

Following multiple employee protests led by Microsoft employees against the company's business and technology contracts with the Israeli occupation army, employees discovered that any emails they sent containing the word "Palestine" were inexplicably disappearing. According to internal correspondence reviewed by The Intercept, which revealed the issue, employees began noticing on Wednesday (May 21, 2025) that emails sent from their company accounts, which contained certain keywords related to Palestine and Israel's ongoing war in Gaza, were not being sent as expected. In some cases, employees reported that the messages arrived hours later. Others never reached the intended recipient's inbox at all.

According to employee test emails reviewed by the site, keywords affected by the outage include "Palestine," "Gaza," "apartheid," and "genocide." The word "Palestinian" does not appear to have been affected, nor do emails containing intentional misspellings of "Palestine." Emails mentioning Israel appear to have been processed immediately.

In an email to The Intercept, Microsoft spokesperson Frank Shaw confirmed and defended the ban. He added, "Sending emails to large numbers of employees about any topic that isn't work-related is inappropriate. We have a dedicated forum for employees who have chosen to participate in political issues. Over the past two days, politically motivated emails have been sent to tens of thousands of employees across the company, and we have taken steps to try to reduce these messages to those who have not chosen to participate."

However, this strict approach does not limit itself to deterring messages sent to large numbers of recipients, but also includes blocking all emails that mention Palestine.

Following a protest held on April 7 during an event celebrating Microsoft's 50th anniversary, two employees "sent separate emails to thousands of their colleagues, demanding that Microsoft cancel its contracts with the Israeli government," according to The Verge.

The email outage follows multiple protests during Microsoft's four-day developer conference this week. The protests were organized by current and former Microsoft employees in collaboration with No Azure Apartheid, an advocacy group demanding the company suspend its work with the Israeli government.

Last February, the Associated Press reported that the Israeli military's use of Microsoft's Azure cloud computing services "spiked" with the start of its ongoing bombardment of Gaza, which has so far killed more than 53,000 Palestinians. Earlier this month, the company cleared itself of any wrongdoing in Gaza after an unspecified internal and external review. While Microsoft claimed it "found no evidence that Azure and Microsoft AI technologies, or any of our other software, were used to harm people," the company also noted that "it is important to recognize that Microsoft does not have clear visibility into how customers use our software on their servers or other devices."