Loon
Project Loon
Internet balloons crossed oceans and connected paying customers before the business proved impossible to sustain.
Quick facts
- Existence state
- Officially Gone
- Peak stage
- general release
- Research confidence
- high
- Last verified
What it was
A Google X project and later Alphabet company that used stratospheric balloons as airborne cellular infrastructure.
Loon progressed from experimental flights to public pilots, emergency connectivity and a customer-facing service in Kenya. It therefore moved beyond limited trials into real service for its intended market.
Existence timeline
Google X begins flying and recovering prototype internet balloons in California.
People in New Zealand become the first users to connect through a Loon balloon.
A school receives the first LTE connection beamed from the stratosphere.
Loon provides communications after flooding in Peru and Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.
The project graduates from X and becomes a separate business within Alphabet.
Loon and its partners launch the first internet-via-balloon service for customers in unserved regions of Kenya.
Alphabet ends the company and publishes the Loon Collection to preserve its research.
Why it ended
Alphabet wound Loon down in 2021 after concluding that the path to long-term commercial viability was longer and riskier than expected.
Last confirmed trace
The Loon Collection preserves technical and operational knowledge, while related optical-communications work continued through Taara.
What it left behind
Loon left a documented body of stratospheric networking research rather than an operating balloon network.
How we classified it
X records that Loon and its partners launched an internet-via-balloon service to customers in Kenya in 2020. That was general availability to the service's intended public, followed by closure.
A customer-facing operational service reached the 100-point stage.
Sources & verification
Last reviewed 2026-08-01. Sources are linked so readers can inspect the evidence directly.