this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
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Microsoft is reportedly banning Palestinians in the U.S. for life for calling relatives in Gaza (www.windowscentral.com)
submitted 7 months ago by Linkerbaan@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
272 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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

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[–] dan@upvote.au 58 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (30 children)

Friendly reminder to not use freemail accounts (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, etc) for anything important. It's very hard to get any sort of support as your account is seen as low-priority. Also, always use your own domain so that it's easy to move to a different provider in the future, without having to change your email address.

FastMail and MXRoute are good options. MXRoute has good Black Friday sales and all their plans include unlimited email address and domains (you're just limited by total disk space).

Microsoft's paid plan is decent too. $70/year for a personal account or $100/year for a family account (up to 6 people) and it includes the Office suite, 1TB cloud storage, and email.

[–] LoreleiSankTheShip@lemmy.ml 8 points 7 months ago (14 children)

Some sites and services won't accept accounts with e-mails outside of the mainstream ones though.

[–] dan@upvote.au 17 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

Do you have an example? That'd block pretty much every business customer, including paid Google and Microsoft users (as the paid accounts use a custom domain). I'm not sure which sites and services would want to block all business users like that.

Also, FastMail is definitely mainstream. It's pretty popular and has been around for 25 years.

[–] LoreleiSankTheShip@lemmy.ml 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

There were 2 online game stores that wouldn't allow me to register with a protonmail account, AllYouPlay and another one that I can't recall, which was weird to me

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