Who is Vaniya Agarwal? Meet the Microsoft Engineer Who Got Fired for Confronting Bill Gates and Satya Nadella

Pro-Palestinian protesters recently disrupted Microsoft's 50th anniversary celebrations at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Microsoft's own employees have raised their voices in support of Palestine. Bill Gates and ex-CEO Steve Ballmer were present in the audience when the protests began.

The reported first incident was due to an employee named Ibtihal Aboussad, who shouted, "Mustafa, shame on you." Mustafa Suleyman is Microsoft's AI chief. Ibtihal walked further towards the stage and said, "You claim that you care about using AI for good, but Microsoft sells AI weapons to the Israeli military. Fifty thousand people have died, and Microsoft powers this genocide in our region. Stop using AI for genocide."

Yet another similar incident drew a lot of public attention as Indian-American Microsoft engineer Vaniya Agarwal confronted Ballmer and Gates while they were onstage with the current CEO, Satya Nadella.

"Shame on you all. You're all hypocrites. Microsoft technology has killed 50,000 Palestinians in Gaza. How dare you? Shame on all of you for celebrating in their blood," Vaniya said.

Escorting Vaniya out of the event didn't take much time. Immediately after her protest, Vaniya Agarwal also sent out a mass email, saying she had decided to leave Microsoft and her last day would be the 11th of April. Vaniya revealed that she could no longer be part of an organization whose work has enabled genocide by Israel.

According to her LinkedIn, Vaniya did her bachelor of science in software engineering at Arizona State University and graduated with distinction. ASU also awarded Vaniya the Grace Hopper Scholarship, an honor that only 35 students of the institution received.

Before starting her career as a software engineer, Vaniya worked as a social media manager at Adagio Teas in 2015 for a few months. She also worked as a medical assistant at the True Health Medical Center.

In May 2018, Vaniya started her software career at Amazon as a software development engineer intern for a period of four months and later became a full-time employee in 2019 before leaving the company in 2022. Agarwal became part of Microsoft in September 2023, joining the tech giant firm as a software engineer II.