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 reliably, Reuters reported.The tech giant’s Bay View building in Mountain View has “been plagued for months by inoperable or, at best, spotty WiFi,” Reuters wrote.Googlers are resorting to Ethernet cables or phone hot spots, and some were told to work from an attached café or walk outside for better connectivity, per Reuters.Employees have a theory for the bad internet: The shape of its roof is eating up the signal like, as Reuters’ Greg Bensinger wrote, “the Bermuda Triangle.”
Staff are blaming the roof’s pointed style for gobbling up Wi-Fi signals, Reuters reported.
NOAH BERGER/AFP via Getty Images
Google’s Bay View headquarters, which opened in March 2022, is the first major office space the company designed and built on its own.The swanky, 600,000 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 a roof fitted with “dragonscale solar skin” to power the building.Based on interior views, one can see how the WiFi-sucking roof theory might 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 is working on a fix.Google’s 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 worries recently, with racial bias controversies in its new generative artificial intelligence 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, Business Insider’s Hugh Langley and Lara O’Reilly wrote.Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.
