Google X's Project Loon provided emergency internet service to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and was shut down by Google in 2021.
Notes on verification
Confirmed by multiple independent contemporaneous news sources for both the 2017 Puerto Rico deployment and the 2021 shutdown. Minor imprecision in that Loon was spun off from X into its own Alphabet subsidiary in 2018 before being shut down, but this doesn't undermine the claim's substance. [tier=silver indep_score=0.883 clusters=6 claim_tier=notable | kind=empirical eligibility=high]
Sources
- Why some 'breakthrough' technologies don't work out (seed:technology_and_ai)
- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/puerto-rico-looks-to-alphabets-x-project-loon-balloons-to-restore-cell-service/ (corroboration)
- https://www.engadget.com/2017-11-09-project-loon-delivers-internet-100-000-people-puerto-rico.html (corroboration)
- https://www.sdxcentral.com/news/alphabets-project-loon-delivers-internet-in-puerto-rico/ (corroboration)
- https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/22/tech/loon-project-alphabet-google-intl-hnk/index.html (corroboration)
- https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/21/google-alphabet-is-shutting-down-loon-internet/ (corroboration)
- https://spacenews.com/google-to-shut-down-loon/ (corroboration)