Google puts off returning to offices another 2 months as COVID-19 cases spike

Google told employees this week that the company will hold off on reopening its offices until Sept. 7, according to a memo obtained by Bloomberg News.

The company employs more than 1,000 people in Austin and took steps last year to expand its office space both downtown and on the East Side. As of last June, Austin was Google's seventh-largest office outside of the San Francisco Bay Area.

The decision came as both Texas and California, the state where most of the tech giant's employees work, have seen spikes in coronavirus cases. Texas saw nearly 7,000 new cases Tuesday.

"While conditions do vary from state to state, we need to see that the U.S. outlook as a whole is stable before we move forward," Chris Rackow, vice president of global security, wrote in the memo. "As the recent resurgence of cases demonstrates, Covid-19 is still very much alive in our communities."

Previously, the company's CEO Sundar Pichai told employees in May that the company would begin slowly returning some workers to the office on July 6. Those plans now appear to be scrapped based on the company memo.

Google's parent company, Alphabet, sent employees home during the second week of March, weeks ahead of some of the other big tech companies. Indeed, another tech giant with offices in Austin, sent its employees home barely a week earlier, one of the first companies in Austin to do so.

Even without the recent spikes in coronavirus cases in the U.S., the company planned for most Google employees to work from home through the end of the year. The work from home extension this week also comes on the heels of a host of other tech companies announcing that they would allow some employees to work from home "forever" if their job allows.