Microsoft cuts ties with Israel’s unit 8200 after surveillance abuse exposed

Microsoft has reportedly cut off the Israeli military’s access to technology used to run a surveillance system that intercepted millions of civilian phone calls in Gaza and the West Bank.

According to The Guardian, citing informed sources, Microsoft informed Israeli officials late last week that Unit 8200 had violated its terms of service by storing massive amounts of surveillance data on its Azure cloud platform.

The decision to limit Unit 8200’s use of certain technologies stems directly from investigations published by The Guardian last month, which revealed how Azure was used to store and process vast troves of Palestinians’ communications in a sweeping surveillance program.

In a joint investigation with an Israeli and a Hebrew-language outlet, The Guardian exposed how Microsoft and Unit 8200 had cooperated on a project to transfer enormous amounts of sensitive intelligence data to Azure.

This project began after a 2021 meeting between Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and then-Unit 8200 commander Yossi Sariel.

In response to the revelations, Microsoft ordered an urgent external review of its relationship with Unit 8200. Preliminary findings have now led to the suspension of the unit’s access to some of Azure’s cloud storage and AI services.

Unit 8200, with nearly unlimited access to Azure’s storage and computational power, had built a new, indiscriminate system that allowed intelligence officers to collect, stream, and analyze the mobile phone content of an entire population.

The project was so extensive that, according to sources within Unit 8200—which is often compared to the U.S. National Security Agency—a slogan emerged internally reflecting its scale and ambition: “One million calls per hour.”

The massive trove of intercepted calls—amounting to more than 8,000 terabytes of data—was stored in a Microsoft data center in the Netherlands. Just days after The Guardian’s investigation was published, Unit 8200 reportedly moved swiftly to extract the surveillance data from the country.

According to sources familiar with the data transfer, the relocation took place in early August.

Intelligence sources said Unit 8200 now plans to migrate the data to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Both the Israeli military and Amazon declined to comment.

Microsoft’s decision to end the intelligence unit’s access to key technologies comes amid mounting pressure from employees and investors over the company’s collaboration with the Israeli military and the role its technology has played in the two-year war on Gaza.

A recent UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza—an accusation supported by many international law experts.

The joint investigation by The Guardian has also sparked protests at Microsoft’s U.S. headquarters and one of its European data centers, alongside growing calls to end all cooperation with the Israeli military.