- Google’s new Bay View office in San Francisco has been hit with WiFi troubles.
- Reuters reported that workers were relying on Ethernet, mobile hot spots, or walking outside.
- Employees said the building’s giant roof was gobbling up the signal, Reuters reported.
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Employees at Google’s newest office in San Francisco have been dealing with bad WiFi for months and need to rely on Ethernet connections to get work done, Reuters has reported.
The tech giant’s Bay View office in Mountain View “has been plagued for months by inoperable or, at best, spotty WiFi,” the report said.
Reuters cited six people who were familiar with the matter but weren’t named.
It reported that Googlers had been resorting to Ethernet cables or phone hot spots, and some had been told to work from an attached café or walk outside for better connectivity.
Employees appear to have a theory for the bad internet: They said the shape of the roof was eating up the signal like “the Bermuda Triangle,” Reuters’ Greg Bensinger wrote.
Staff are blaming the roof’s wave-like style for gobbling up WiFi signals, Reuters reported.
NOAH BERGER/AFP via Getty Images
Google’s Bay View headquarters, which opened in May 2022, is the first major office space the company designed and built on its own.
The swanky 1.1-million-square-foot campus includes a bevy of perks and extra features, such as an on-campus hotel, a laundry room, stationary bikes you can use to charge your phone, and roofs fitted with “dragonscale solar skin” to power the buildings.
Based on interior views, one can see how the WiFi-sucking-roof theory may have emerged. Google’s debut video of the campus shows massive curved panels looming high above open-air office spaces, which it calls “team neighborhoods.”
A Google spokesperson told Reuters that “we’ve had WiFi connectivity issues in Bay View” and that the company was working on a fix.
Google has been asking its employees to return to the office at least three days a week since April 2022, at a time when many tech firms still adhered to a remote-working policy.
Bad WiFi has been one of its lesser problems recently, with racial-bias controversies in its new generative-AI model Gemini sparking a $90 billion sell-off of company shares in February.
The tech firm has been struggling to stay ahead of the game, especially with new AI tech sweeping the globe, calling into question its status as Silicon Valley’s wonder child, as Business Insider’s Hugh Langley and Lara O’Reilly wrote.
Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.
Correction: March 8, 2024 — An earlier version of this story misstated when Google opened its Bay View campus. It was in May 2022, not March 2022. It also misstated the size of the campus. It amounts to 1.1 million square feet, not 600,000 square feet.
