Palestinians calling home to Gaza on Skype have had their digital lives destroyed, after Microsoft closed their email accounts without warning.
BBC News has spoken to 20 Palestinians living abroad who say Microsoft, which owns the voice and video chat app, kicked them out of their accounts. The total number affected is thought to be much higher.
In some cases, these email accounts are more than 15 years old and the users have no way to retrieve emails, contacts or memories.
Microsoft says they violated its terms of service - but will not say how - and the decision is final.
The Gazans say they have no links to Hamas - designated as a terrorist organisation by some Western countries, including the US, where Microsoft is headquartered - and accuse the technology giant, the most valuable company in the world, of persecuting them unfairly.
When they’re not recording your desktop in an unencrypted database for AI, boot-looping your computer with bad patches or showing ads in your start menu, they’re disabling your account for calling family to see if they’re still alive. Damn.
Okay, regardless of what you think about the war going on in Israel, you at least gotta admit that this is fucked up. As if I needed another reason to never trust macrohard.
I’m glad I switched to proton.
Microsoft says they violated its terms of service - but will not say how - and the decision is final.
Classic Microsoft move. Do you remember what happened to kids and people being forced to register a Microsoft account to not lose their paid license to Minecraft, but who didn’t want to hand out their phone numbers? Yeah. They have somehow “violated the terms of service”, even if they did nothing with their account after registration, other than the license being transferred!
“It’s been a week since our last attempt to fuck over our users, we must continue to innovate. Any ideas?”
