A BBC investigation reveals that Microsoft is permanently banning Palestinians in the U.S. and other countries who use Skype to call relatives in Gaza.
Reportedly, Microsoft has been banning and wiping the accounts of users who have leveraged Skype to contact relatives in Gaza. In some cases, email accounts over a decade old have been locked, destroying access to banking accounts, OneDrive storage, and beyond.
United States resident Salah Elsadi lost his account of over 15 years in the dragnet. “I’ve had this Hotmail for 15 years. They banned me for no reason, saying I have violated their terms — what terms? Tell me. I’ve filled out about 50 forms and called them many many times.” Eiad Hametto from Saudi Arabia echoed the report, “We are civilians with no political background who just wanted to check on our families. They’ve suspended my email account that I’ve had for nearly 20 years. It was connected to all my work. They killed my life online.”
Many of the users affected by the bans expressed that Microsoft may be falsely labelling them as Hamas
I’ve been vassilating on it for a couple years, actually. I was going to do it when I built a PC (I just had a laptop for college) but then my parents bought one for me while I was in the middle of figuring out what parts to get with my sister’s help. It’s probably my fault for telling them about it around my b.day, tbf. 😂 I used a partitioned system that she helped set up for me 10 years ago or something like that, but I wanted to make one that was just a Linux PC, and for the past few years the idea of installing Linux on my current computer just never occurred to me because my plan became obsolete. The brain is a funny thing.
Nice!