Microsoft has decided against hosting its popular developer conference for 2026 and beyond in Seattle — the hometown of the company’s founders — after attendees complained about the open drug use and  “general uncleanliness” of the downtown Seattle street scene.

The decision comes just weeks after the 2025 conference — known as  Microsoft Build, the software giant’s annual conference that draws nearly 5,000 attendees each year — was disrupted by pro-Palestinian activists, some of whom threw red glitter at attendees to protest the company’s business relationship with the Israeli government. 

“Microsoft Build will be cancelling their 2026 program and releasing holds for all future years,” Microsoft wrote in a memo, first obtained by an independent journalist, Jonathan Choe, adding that it had struggled to find the conference’s “identity” in the post-Covid era. 

The company also cited “leadership & attendee experience walking the convention core” of downtown Seattle for its decision to pull all future Build conferences from the city.

“The customers citied [sic] Attendees spoke of “the general uncleanliness of the street scene, visibility of individuals engaging in drug use, and unhoused” individuals, the company wrote in its “DEFINITE BOOKING CANCELLATION NOTIFICATION” to the city’s official destination marketing organization, Visit Seattle.

Microsoft confirmed its decision to withdraw Build 2026 from Seattle in a statement, but disputed that Seattle’s current conditions influenced the decision.

“It would be inaccurate to say that any of our plans for 2026 are being influenced by the environment of this year’s event,” a Microsoft representative said. 

Seattle joins other major cities, like Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco, whose progressive approach to low-level crimes has contributed to mass business closures and rising crime rates in the post-Covid years. 

Seattle’s downtown has been particularly hard hit. “The leadership in our city has not addressed in a reasonable way the fentanyl and methamphetamine epidemic and the severe mental illness epidemic that we have on our streets,” a Seattle resident who is a city council candidate, Rachael Savage, said in an interview with the Sun. Ms. Savage, who was forced to close her meditation center in the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood due to dangerous street conditions when the city reopened following the Covid lockdown, said Seattle remains mired in a “lawless situation.” 

“We’ve had businesses leaving Seattle, and downtown has not recovered from the Covid lockdowns. You see boarded-up businesses. You see a lack of people going down and working, eating, and playing downtown,” Ms. Savage said. “It’s just not sustainable.”

Seattle’s problems with Covid were compounded by the riots that followed the death of George Floyd. In June 2020, far-left activists took over part of Capitol Hill and created the “CHAZ,” or Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, where any law enforcement was banned. The local police precinct was abandoned. By the time the occupation fell about a month later, two teenagers had been killed in gunfire.

Restrictions placed on police by city government in the wake of the George Floyd unrest had a lasting effect on crime rates. Between 2020 and 2022, nearly 2,400 businesses left the downtown Seattle area amid the city’s struggles with office vacancies and rising crime rates.

Mayor Bruce Harrell’s Downtown Activation Plan, which aims to revitalize downtown retail and tourism traffic by emphasizing progressive causes célèbres like “climate justice” and “race and social justice,” has been criticized by some longtime city residents as ineffective. Despite some improvements in tourism and daily foot traffic, the city still struggles to fully return to rates that preceded the pandemic and anti-law enforcement unrest. Losing Microsoft Build only hurts the city at a time when it sorely needs the business.

“It’s deeply troubling that a city like Seattle, home to some of the world’s most innovative companies, can no longer keep major events like Microsoft Build. This isn’t just about a canceled conference. It’s about a mayor who hasn’t met the moment,” a Seattle mayoral candidate, Joe Mallahan, said in a statement to the Sun.