Radboud against Microsoft

Radboud against the genocide in Gaza

Starting today, 1 September 2025, I protest the genocide in Gaza by refusing to use Radboud University's central Microsoft Outlook 365 service. If you email me at djoerd.hiemstra@ru.nl you will receive the following automatic reply:

This is an automatic reply. To protest the genocide in Gaza, I refuse to read email sent to: djoerd.hiemstra@ru.nl
To contact me, please resend your email to: hiemstra@cs.ru.nl
For more information, read the statement at: https://www.cs.ru.nl/~hiemstra/radboud-against-microsoft/.
This is week 1 of my protest.

Protest statement

It has been established beyond any reasonable doubt that a genocide is taking place in Gaza, Palestine. This has been established by the United Nations, by Amnesty International, by Doctors without Borders, and even by Israeli human rights organizations B'Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel.

It has also been established that Microsoft directly enables the genocide in Gaza. BDS (the Palestinian movement promoting Boycotts, Divestments, and Sanctions of Israel) calls Microsoft: "perhaps the most complicit tech company in Israel's illegal apartheid regime and ongoing genocide". The Israeli military relies on Microsoft's cloud technology and artificial intelligence systems for its "targeted" bombardments of Gaza. Microsoft's servers in the Netherlands and Ireland store a giant database of Palestinians' phone calls used to identiy targets of lethal strikes, including health workers, journalists, university staff and students, deliberately killing them in their homes along with their family and children. Microsoft's direct involvement in the genocide and the military-industrial complex is documented meticuously by Brown University's Cost of War project, and Microsoft's employees actively protest their company too: No Azure for Apartheid!

With this protest and academic disobedience, I call on the board of Radboud University to condemn the genocide in Gaza by cutting all the ties with the enablers of the genocide, including the government of Israel, Israeli universities, Microsoft, and all other organizations that are mentioned in the Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories. I invite students and staff of Radboud University to join me in this protest.

How to join the protest?

Set your email automatic reply with your protest text as follows:

  1. Login to https://outlook.office.com using your RU credentials;
  2. Go to "Mail" (clicking the envelope in the left column);
  3. Click on the settings wheel in the top right (on small screens, click on "..." first);
  4. Click on "Account" on the left;
  5. Click on "Automatic replies";
  6. Select "Automatic replies on" and insert your protest statement both "inside your organization" and "outside your organization"
  7. Tip: Every week, update your text (I update "This is week 1 of my protest"), so the message will be send again if people contact you multiple times.