Microsoft temporarily locked down Building 34 at its Redmond, Washington, headquarters on Tuesday after seven activists—two of them current employees—entered President Brad Smith’s office and staged a sit-in. Redmond police removed the group and arrested all seven on trespassing-related charges, allowing Smith to reclaim the office later in the day. The protesters, organised under the banner "No Azure for Apartheid," demanded that Microsoft end cloud-computing work for the Israeli government. They renamed the space the “Mai Ubeid Building,” unfurled banners accusing the company of facilitating human-rights abuses in Gaza and livestreamed the occupation before police intervened. At an impromptu press conference held in the same office hours after the arrests, Smith said Microsoft is "working every day" to review whether Israel’s military has misused the company’s Azure services, adding that most contracts focus on cybersecurity. He confirmed the internal lockdown, criticised the office takeover as "not standard employee conduct" and said disciplinary action is under consideration. Microsoft hired Covington & Burling this month to investigate allegations, first detailed by The Guardian, that Israel’s Unit 8200 used a segregated Azure environment to store mass-surveillance data on Palestinians. The company has previously found no evidence of its technology being used to target civilians but said it will publish factual findings from the new probe. Tuesday’s action follows a series of campus demonstrations—one of which led to 18 arrests last week—and underscores rising pressure on major tech firms over military contracts in the Middle East.