Google parent company Alphabet Inc.’s ambitious plans to expand into the drone space have hit stormy weather with news Tuesday that the company has canned a potential new deal and is trimming its head count.

According to Bloomberg, Project Wing, the drone development arm of Alphabet’s X division, has canned talks to develop a partnership with Starbucks Corp. to presumably drone deliver coffee over disagreements about the access to customer data that Alphabet wanted, but Starbucks wasn’t happy to hand over.

At the same time, Project Wing is said to have frozen hiring and has began asking some staff to seek jobs elsewhere in the company.

Project Wing first received approval to run test flights in an agreement with the Federal Aviation Administration in August and is said to still have an agreement with Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. to test burrito delivery by drone.

The move to cancel a potential deal with Starbucks and scale back its own drone program is claimed to be part of a broader move by Alphabet to rein back spending in its X, sometimes called its “moonshot” division,” and to turn the division around to focusing on bringing new technologies to market versus simply indulging in projects that have little chance of success.

“Project Wing has the potential to remove a big chunk of the friction in how physical things are moved around in the world,” a spokeswoman for X told Bloomberg via email. “What we’re doing now is developing the next phase of our technology, and as always are thinking in a very broad way about all the potential use cases for delivery by unmanned aerial systems.”

Alphabet’s X division, previously better known as Google X, has always been an indulgence from company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and includes projects such as Glass, Loon, Project Wing itself and the self-driving car project.

Image credit: Project Wing/Alphabet