These days Google is creating numerous headlines but for all the wrong reasons. Recently, the search engine giant fired 28 of its employees amid the protest against the company's $1.2 billion project 'Nimbus' with Israel. 

Several employees participated in a sit-in protest in the New York and Sunnyvale offices of the company and it live-streamed on several social media platforms as well. The employees believe that Google has some involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict via Project Nimbus. 

What is Project Nimbus?

Project Nimbus is a cloud and AI computing contract Google has with the Israeli government which is estimated to be worth around $1.2 billion. The project sees Google's cloud division and partner Amazon Web Services (AWS), which equips the Israeli government with a secure AI and cloud computing infrastructure. 

The Israeli government is currently involved in a litigious conflict with Palestine, hence the project and the contract are viewed as a support from Google to the Israeli military.  Employees of the company are calling this an "AI-powered genocide" in Gaza. 

Emaan Haseem, one of the protesters and the fired employees talked about her views on the situation to the abc7news and said, "It was not possible to come to work every week without acknowledging and loudly condemning Project Nimbus and any support for the Israeli government."

Google's response to the employees' protest 

Google just came out of the Gemini AI controversy and now has to face another with Project Nimbus The protest ran for eight hours when the employees refused to leave the Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian's office. Police officials were called and arrests were made in order to remove the protesters. 

The company released a statement through The Verge. It was by Chris Rackow, head of global security at Google. It called the protest "unacceptable and extremely disruptive." It also stated that the employee's actions "made coworkers feel threatened" and violated several company policies, including the Code of Conduct and policies on harassment and workplace behaviour.

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