Mai Ubeid was a software engineer and member of Gaza Sky Geeks, a tech community
backed by Google for Startups. She landed a Google-backed internship after graduating
valedictorian of her university class. She was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy and
began using a wheelchair at the age of 12, and she dreamed of founding a startup to
support people living with disabilities like herself. Instead, she was martyred in
an Israeli airstrike.
We hosted a vigil in her honor in NYC on Tuesday, November 28, 2023 at 5pm EST at 14th
Street Park, in order to provide a space for our community to mourn and honor Mai
Ubeid and all Palestinian lives lost.
Zelda began tabling in NYC in an effort to educate workers in the office about Project Nimbus. Tabling became very critical for our relational basebuilding. Over the course of the following months, tabling expanded to 5 other offices: Seattle, Kirkland, San Francisco, Sunnyvale, and San Bruno.
No Tech For Apartheid (NOTA) Google organizers hosted a Day of Solidarity with Palestine across the NYC, San Francisco, Seattle, and London offices. Several participants were doxxed on Twitter, and pictures of them shared in internal mailing lists and on Twitter.
A brave Google Cloud engineer spoke up against Google's complicity in Israel's genocide against the Palestinian people. NOTA's video of the worker standing up for their rights went viral, with some reposts reaching up to 8 million views and generating widespread global support, including from Palestinians in Gaza. Three days later, Google fired this worker in a clear cut act of retaliation against its own worker for speaking up about the terms and conditions of their labor.
Dozens of Google workers took part in a coordinated set of civil resistance actions at Google offices around the United States. Some workers occupied Google's New York offices. Others occupied the Sunnyvale, California, office of Thomas Kurian, the CEO of Google Cloud. This protest was an escalation of the ongoing No Tech for Apartheid (NOTA) campaign, which has been demanding for years that Google and Amazon cancel Project Nimbus. In response, Google had 9 of their own employees arrested, and fired over 50 employees in retaliation.