An Android statue is displayed in front of a building on the Google campus on January 31, 2022 in Mountain View, California. Google parent company Alphabet will report fourth quarter earnings on Tuesday after the closing bell.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Google no longer requires people to be vaccinated against Covid in order to enter its buildings.
In a companywide email sent to employees Tuesday, which was viewed by CNBC, Google VP of global security Chris Rackow said “vaccines will no longer be required as a condition of entry to any of our buildings.”
“Last month marks three years since the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic,” Rackow wrote in his memo. “We put in place emergency measures such as our Covid-19 vaccine policy to keep everyone safe, but now the world is in a very different place. Most people today have some level of immunity against COVID-19, case rates and hospitalizations have stabilized for many months now, and governments all around the world — including the U.S. — are ending emergency declarations, lifting restrictions and ending vaccination mandates.”
In December 2021, Google told employees that they must comply with vaccine policies or they’d face losing pay and then eventually losing their job, citing rules for government contractors. Then, in February, ahead of asking employees to come back to offices and the U.S. appeals court deciding that rule’s legal standing, the company relaxed policies around requiring vaccines for employment, as well as other rules around testing, social distancing and masks.
However, it still required employees to be vaccinated to enter company sites.
Several hundred Google employees at the time signed and circulated a manifesto opposing the company’s Covid vaccine mandate, arguing leadership’s decision will have an outsized influence in corporate America. It also noted outbreaks kept happening at Google offices among vaccinated employees while those who declined to declare their vaccination status were still banned from offices and other gatherings including off-sites, summits and team events.
In his email, Rackow encouraged employees to remain up to date with their Covid vaccines going forward, “just as we encourage everyone to get a flu shot every year,” adding that the vaccines have been “critical” to keeping Google employees safe in the workplace.
The mandate change comes after President Joe Biden signed a bill Monday to end the national emergency declared during the Covid pandemic that has been in place for more than three years. In January, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Covid remains a global health emergency, though weekly Covid deaths have dropped 70% since the peak of the first massive omicron wave in February 2022. However, deaths started increasing again in December as China, the world’s most populous country, faced its largest wave of infection yet.
The mandate change also comes as Google has struggled to get employees back into physical offices and as the company has begun downsizing its real estate amid broader cost-cutting efforts. A CNBC report last month showed Google plans to ask cloud employees and partners to share desks at the division’s five largest locations, which include New York and San Francisco.
Google declined to comment.
Read the full memo below:
“Last month marks three years since the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic. We put in place emergency measures such as our Covid-19 vaccine policy to keep everyone safe, but now the world is in a very different place. Most people today have some level of immunity against Covid-19, case rates and hospitalizations have stabilized for many months now, and governments all around the world — including the U.S. — are ending emergency declarations, lifting restrictions and ending vaccination mandates.
Based on this, we’re now lifting our global vaccine policy. This means that vaccines will no longer be required as a condition of entry to any of our buildings. Those with existing accommodations will receive an email with further guidance.
Covid-19 vaccines have been a critical part of our overall strategy to keep Googlers safe, especially in the workplace. They also have the benefit of reducing the risk of severe disease if you get infected and have helped to protect vulnerable members of our community. We encourage everyone to remain up to date with their Covid-19 vaccines going forward, just as we encourage everyone to get a flu shot every year.
We’ll continue to follow all local regulations and will maintain our cleaning and ventilation standards in the office, and we ask that you do your part by monitoring your health and staying home if you feel sick.
We’ve come through an extraordinary time, which called on us to adapt and come together in ways we couldn’t have imagined. I am proud and grateful for the resilience you’ve all shown as we navigated so much uncertainty—for our company and the world—over the past few years.
Thank you again for everything you do to keep your colleagues and communities safe.
Chris Martin of Coldplay performs live at San Siro Stadium, Milan, Italy, in July 2017.
Mairo Cinquetti | NurPhoto | Getty Images
Days after Astronomer CEO Andy Byron resigned from the tech startup, the HR exec who was with him at the infamous Coldplay concert has left as well.
“Kristin Cabot is no longer with Astronomer, she has resigned,” a company spokesperson wrote in an email to CNBC Thursday. Cabot was the company’s chief people officer.
Cabot and Byron, who is married with children, were shown in an intimate moment on the ‘kiss cam’ at a recent Coldplay show in Boston, and immediately hid when they saw their faces on the big screen. Lead singer Chris Martin said, “Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy.” An attendee’s video of the incident went viral.
Byron resigned from the company on Saturday. Both Cabot and Byron have been removed the company’s leadership team webpage.
Pete DeJoy, Astronomer’s interim CEO, wrote in a post earlier this week that recent and unexpected national attention has turned the company into “a household name.”
In May, the New York-based company, which commercializes open source software, announced a $93 million investment round led by Bain Ventures and other investors, including Salesforce Ventures.
Elon Musk‘s satellite internet service Starlink said it had a “network outage” on Thursday. The company said it was working on a solution.
There were more than 60,000 reports of an outage on Downdetector, a site that logs issues.
Starlink is owned and operated by SpaceX, which is also run by Musk.
Musk apologized for the outage on his social media platform X and said, “Service will be restored shortly.”
Musk posted earlier Thursday that the company’s direct-to-cell-phone service was “growing fast” following the announcement that T-Mobile‘s Starlink-powered satellite service was available to the public.
T-Mobile said the T-Satellite service was built to keep phones connected “in places no carrier towers can reach.”
Starlink didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Starlink internet speeds and reliability decrease with popularity, a recent study found.
It wasn’t immediately clear if the T-Satellite service was affected by or involved in the outage.
The Intel logo is displayed on a sign in front of Intel headquarters on July 16, 2025 in Santa Clara, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Intel reported second-quarter results on Thursday that beat Wall Street expectations on revenue, as the company’s new CEO Lip-Bu Tan announced significant cuts in chip factory construction. The stock ticked higher in extended trading.
Here’s how the chipmaker did versus LSEG consensus estimates:
Earnings per share: Loss of 10 cents per share, adjusted.
Revenue: $12.86 billion versus $11.92 billion estimated
Intel said it expects revenue for the third-quarter of $13.1 billion at the midpoint of its range, versus the average analyst estimate of $12.65 billion. The chipmaker said that it expects to break even on earnings while analysts were looking for earnings of 4 cents per share.
For the second quarter, Intel reported a net loss of $2.9 billion, or 67 cents per share, compared with a $1.61 billion net loss, or 38 cents per share, in the year-earlier period. Earnings per share were not comparable to analyst estimates due to an $800 million impairment charge, “related to excess tools with no identified re-use,” the company said. That resulted in an EPS adjustment of about 20 cents.
The report was Intel’s second since Lip-Bu Tan took over as CEO in March, promising to make the chipmaker’s products competitive again, and to reduce bureaucracy and layers of management, including slashing staff in Oregon and California.
In a memo to employees published on Thursday, Tan said that the first few months of his tenure had “not been easy.” He said that the company had “completed the majority” of its planned layoffs, amounting to 15% of the workforce, and that it plans to end the year with 75,000 employees. Intel previously said it was trying to reduce operating expenses by $17 billion in 2025.
Intel shares are up about 13% this year as of Thursday’s close after plummeting 60% in 2024, their worst year on record.
Tan also announced several other spending cuts in the memo, particularly in the company’s costly foundry division, which makes chips for other companies and is still looking for a big customer to anchor the business.
Intel said its foundry business had an operating loss of $3.17 billion on $4.4 billion in revenue.
Tan said that Intel had cancelled planned fab projects in Germany and Poland, and will consolidate its testing and assembly operations in Vietnam and Malaysia. He added that the company would slow down the pace of its construction of a cutting-edge chip factory in Ohio, depending on market demand and if it can secure big customers for the facility.
“Over the past several years, the company invested too much, too soon – without adequate demand,” Tan wrote. “In the process, our factory footprint became needlessly fragmented and underutilized.”
Tan wrote that the company’s forthcoming chip manufacturing process, called 14A, will be built out based on confirmed customer commitments.
“There are no more blank checks. Every investment must make economic sense,” Tan wrote.
The company’s client computing group, which is primarily comprised of sales of central processors for PCs, had $7.9 billion in sales, down 3% on an annual basis.
Revenue in the data center group, which includes some AI chips but is mostly central processors for servers, rose 4% to $3.9 billion. Tan wrote in his memo that Intel wants to regain market share in data center chips, and is looking for a permanent leader for the business. Longtime rival Advanced Micro Devices has increasingly been winning server business from cloud customers.
Tan added he would personally review and approve all chip designs before they are taped out, which is the final step of the design process before a new chip is manufactured.