Google terminated 28 employees in April 2024 after protests at company offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California, over Project Nimbus, the company's cloud-computing contract with the Israeli government. The dismissals followed sit-ins that resulted in nine arrests and intensified a long-running dispute inside Google over the types of government and military-related work employees believe the company should undertake.
The dispute involved two sharply different accounts of what happened. Google said employees had occupied workspaces, disrupted colleagues and violated workplace policies. Protest organizers said the dismissals were retaliatory and maintained that some people who lost their jobs had not directly participated in the sit-ins.
Google fires 28 employees after office protests
The protests took place on April 16, 2024, at Google facilities in New York and Sunnyvale. In California, protesters occupied the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian for several hours. Other employees demonstrated in a communal area of Google's New York office.
Nine employees were arrested after refusing requests to leave, according to contemporaneous reporting. Participants said some workers had their access to company systems disabled and were placed on administrative leave while Google investigated the demonstrations.
The following day, Google's vice president of global security, Chris Rackow, informed employees that 28 workers had been terminated following individual investigations.
Google said the protesters had disrupted operations and physically impeded other employees from working or accessing company facilities. The company said such conduct violated several workplace policies and that further investigations could result in additional action.
Reuters reported at the time that Google confirmed the dismissal of 28 employees and said a small number of protesters had entered and disrupted several office locations.
Project Nimbus is at the center of the dispute
The demonstrations were organized by the No Tech for Apartheid campaign and focused on Project Nimbus, a cloud-services agreement awarded to Google and Amazon by the Israeli government in 2021. The contract has been widely reported as being worth about $1.2 billion.
Google provides cloud infrastructure and related technology to governments and businesses around the world. Protest organizers argued that Project Nimbus could support Israeli military operations and called on Google to withdraw from the contract.
Google disputed that characterization. The company said its work under the contract involved commercially available cloud services provided to Israeli government ministries and was not directed at highly sensitive, classified or weapons-related military workloads.
That distinction became central to the public dispute: protesters focused on the potential uses and broader consequences of Google's technology, while Google maintained that the services covered by the contract were general-purpose commercial cloud products.
Employees challenged Google's role in government technology contracts
The April demonstrations were part of a broader debate among some Google employees over government and defense-related technology work.
Cheyne Anderson, a Google Cloud software developer who participated in the Sunnyvale protest, told CNBC at the time that he opposed Google accepting military contracts regardless of the government involved. Anderson was among the workers arrested during the demonstration.
Another employee, Hasan Ibraheem, said his opposition was connected to concerns about how technology developed by Google might ultimately be used. Protest organizers also raised workplace concerns, including what they described as harassment, intimidation and censorship directed at Palestinian, Arab and Muslim employees.
Google, by contrast, framed its response around workplace conduct rather than employees' political views. In its statement about the incident, the company said physically preventing colleagues from working and occupying company facilities crossed the line established by its workplace rules.
Google management reinforced workplace conduct rules
On April 18, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai published an internal message that addressed workplace behavior more broadly. Pichai said Google wanted to preserve a culture of open discussion but emphasized that employees could not disrupt coworkers or use the workplace as a platform for conduct that interfered with company operations.
The message did not focus solely on Project Nimbus, but it came immediately after the protests and dismissals and reinforced management's position that political disagreement did not override company rules governing workplace conduct.
The full message was later published by Google.
The initial 28 dismissals were not the end of the dispute
The original announcement covered 28 terminated employees, but Google subsequently dismissed additional workers following further investigations. By late April, reporting from the Associated Press described more than 50 workers as having been fired in connection with the protests and related investigations.
This later development is important because it occurred after the original 28-worker announcement and should not be confused with the number Google disclosed immediately after the April 16 demonstrations.
Some dismissed workers later challenged Google's actions through the U.S. labor-relations system. The Associated Press reported on April 30, 2024, that workers filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, arguing that their participation, or perceived participation, in the demonstrations was connected to workplace conditions and therefore legally protected.
Google rejected that argument and said it stood by the terminations, maintaining that the cases involved employees disrupting and occupying workspaces and making colleagues feel unsafe.
Why the dispute mattered for Google's business
The confrontation illustrated a management challenge facing large technology companies whose cloud and artificial-intelligence products are increasingly sold to governments. The same infrastructure that supports ordinary business applications can also be purchased by public-sector agencies, creating disagreements among employees over acceptable customers and uses.
For Google, the dispute also came during a period in which cloud computing and artificial intelligence were becoming increasingly important to Alphabet's growth. Alphabet reported Google Cloud revenue of $9.57 billion for the first quarter of 2024, up 28% from the same period a year earlier.
That makes government cloud contracts more than an internal cultural issue. They sit at the intersection of commercial growth, employee relations, corporate policy and questions about how broadly technology companies should control the downstream use of general-purpose infrastructure.
What the April 2024 episode established
The immediate facts were relatively clear: nine workers were arrested during the New York and Sunnyvale sit-ins, Google initially terminated 28 employees after investigations, and additional dismissals followed later in April.
The underlying disagreement remained unresolved. Protesters continued to argue that Google should end Project Nimbus and that workers should be able to challenge contracts they believe raise ethical or workplace concerns. Google continued to defend both the contract and its right to enforce rules against conduct it considered disruptive.
The episode therefore became both a labor dispute and a test of how one of the world's largest technology companies manages internal opposition to government contracts involving cloud and AI services.
Google's memo to employees
In the internal memo issued after the protests, security executive Chris Rackow told employees that Google had investigated the incidents and terminated 28 workers found to have been involved.
The memo said protesters had taken over office spaces, interfered with the work of other employees and violated multiple company policies. Rackow warned that Google would continue investigating the events and could take further disciplinary action, including termination, when workplace standards were violated.
That warning proved consequential: subsequent investigations resulted in additional dismissals later in April.
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