Nine Google employees were arrested Tuesday night in New York City and Sunnyvale, Calif., after an hour-long wait. Sit-in to protest their company’s contract with IsraelA spokesperson for No Tech For Apartheid told Gizmodo. Google said it had cut off the protesters’ badge access and placed them on administrative leave.
“Hindering other employees’ work and preventing them from entering our facilities is a clear violation of our policies, and we will investigate and take action,” a Google spokesperson said in an email to Gizmodo on Wednesday. “These employees have been placed on administrative leave and they Access to our systems was also cut off, and after repeated requests to leave the premises were denied, law enforcement intervened to secure the office.”
Four protesters were arrested Tuesday night for infiltrating Google’s New York headquarters, the NYPD confirmed to Gizmodo. The Sunnyvale Police Department did not immediately respond to calls made outside regular business hours. A spokesperson for the protesters said that as of Wednesday morning, all nine Google employees had been released.
Google employees are protesting their company’s $1.2 billion Project Nimbus contract, which provides artificial intelligence and cloud computing services to the Israeli government and military. The sit-in lasted several hours and drew a large crowd of onlookers outside Google’s headquarters to protest the company’s role in the war between Israel and Palestine.
No Tech for Apartheid said it has encountered extreme opposition within Google, but on Wednesday it faced new hostility from online members of the tech community. On X day, many people expressed defiance to these protesting employees, saying that this was the latest “Woke up and failed miserably.“
“This company has been effectively taken over by an employee mob,” Andreeseen Horowitz co-founder Marc Andreessen said in a statement. tweet Tuesday.
Chaya Raichick, founder of LibsOfTikTok, said: “All these entitled brats should be fired on the spot.” another tweet.
“That’s what happens when you’re a DEI company,” said other.
The nine employees placed on administrative leave are the latest to face penalties for protesting Google’s contracts with Israel. Last month, Eddie Hatfield, a 23-year-old software engineer at Google, was fired for disrupting an executive’s speech and shouting “Apartheid has no technology!” In Israel Technology Conference. “We’ll have to wait and see” whether more protests follow these sit-ins, Hatfield told Gizmodo on Tuesday.