Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal decides to ditch Microsoft Cloud after LinkedIn saga

NEW DELHI — Taking on Satya Nadella-run Microsoft after a frustrated experience with LinkedIn, Ola Founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal on Saturday announced to leave the tech giant’s Azure cloud services and move the entire workload of his company to his own artificial intelligence (AI) venture Krutrim.

The decision came after Aggarwal slammed the Microsoft-owned professional network LinkedIn for deleting his posts without notifying him.

“Since LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft and Ola is a big customer of Azure, we’ve decided to move our entire workload out of Azure to our own Krutrim cloud within the next week,” he said in a blog post.

“It is a challenge as all developers know, but my team is so charged up about doing this,” the Ola CEO added.

Aggarwal also told developers who want to move out of Microsoft’s Azure cloud to offer them “a full year worth of free cloud usage, “as long as you don’t go back to Azure after that”.

He had criticised LinkedIn, saying their AI tool was imposing a political ideology on Indian users which is unsafe and sinister.

There was no immediate word from either Microsoft or LinkedIn on Aggarwal’s announcement to drop Azure Cloud for his own Krutrim cloud.

The saga started when Aggarwal took to X to share his thoughts on gender pronouns, with a post on “pronoun illness”. In the response, the LinkedIn bot used “they” and “their” to address the founder.

Aggarwal said in his post that regarding gender inclusivity, “We don’t need lectures from western companies on how to be inclusive”.

“On a personal note, I had visited Ayodhya last year and learnt about how transgenders had been accorded special respect in our culture from ancient times,” he commented.

On the other hand, the pronoun issue “I wrote about is a woke political ideology of entitlement which doesn’t belong to India”.