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Happy birthday to perhaps the most expensive 16 seconds in corporate history.
Exactly one year ago today, two people went to see Coldplay and ensured that nobody will ever look at a stadium kiss cam in quite the same way again.
The moment itself lasted barely longer than it takes Chris Martin to sing the opening line of Yellow, but it resulted in resignations, investigations, think pieces, conspiracy theories, Oprah interviews, memes, and a cautionary tale that every HR department on Earth has probably added to its onboarding presentation.
If you somehow escaped it, here’s the refresher.
What was the Coldplay kiss cam scandal?
During a Coldplay concert in Boston on July 16, 2025, the venue cameras landed on Astronomer CEO Andy Byron with his arms wrapped around the company’s HR chief Kristin Cabot.
Instead of smiling and waving like every other couple on the giant screen, the pair reacted as though they’d just been selected for The Hunger Games. Cabot buried her face in her hands while Byron practically disappeared behind a barrier.
Chris Martin, blissfully unaware of the corporate earthquake he’d just triggered, joked: ‘Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy.’
The internet heard the first option and never looked back. One year on, social media users are proving the clip still occupies a permanent place in the internet’s collective memory.
‘One year later and this still lives rent-free in my head,’ one person wrote.
Another asked in disbelief: ‘It’s already been one year???’
Others were convinced time itself had malfunctioned. ‘Only one year?! This feels like it happened during Covid,’ one joked, while another insisted: ‘I swear this was six months ago.’
But behind one of the internet’s favourite memes was a story that became considerably less funny for the people living through it.
What happened after the Coldplay kiss cam video went viral?
Within days of the clip going viral, online sleuths had identified both Cabot and Byron, discovered they were married to other people, and turned them into the internet’s newest villains.
The original TikTok has since been viewed more than 130 million times, while both ultimately left their jobs at Astronomer.
Cabot, who has spoken publicly abot the backlash several times, has never disputed that embracing her boss at a concert was inappropriate.
She has since said she was already separating from her husband at the time and believed Byron was separated too, while maintaining the Coldplay concert was the first time the pair had been physically affectionate.
‘I made a mistake. I’ll own that all day,’ she recently told the Boston Globe. ‘I made a really poor judgment call in the moment… But you shouldn’t be killed for that.’
The consequences were far more severe than she ever imagined. Cabot says paparazzi camped outside her home for weeks, she received death threats warning her to ‘watch her back’ while grocery shopping, and she struggled to leave the house for much of last summer.
The moment was also widely parodied, with Strictly mocking the moment with a reenactment and an entire skit on it featuring on Saturday Night Live.
Her children, now 15 and 17, even asked her not to visit their schools after the scandal exploded.
Where is the Coldplay kiss cam couple now?
The career damage has proved equally lasting. Nearly a year on, Cabot revealed she is still unemployed and has been forced to dip into retirement savings and money she’d set aside for her children’s college education while looking for work outside human resources.
She has, however, started venturing back into public life. Speaking at an event this month about online harassment, Cabot joked that she’d deliberately attended a recent Jack Johnson concert because there was ‘no jumbotron’.
When another concertgoer recognised her and quipped, ‘Wow, you’re back on the concert circuit!’, she laughed: ‘Zip it!’
She admitted she is ‘still a hot mess’ but says she’s finally beginning to rebuild her confidence. Cabot also revealed she no longer speaks to Byron.
‘I think there was a lack of transparency, and maybe not as much honesty as I would have liked,’ she told the Globe. ‘I couldn’t have that in my life anymore.’
The comment mirrors what she previously told Oprah Winfrey, where she said Byron ‘wasn’t the person he represented himself to be’ and described honesty as ‘a non-negotiable’.
Byron, meanwhile, has remained almost entirely silent since leaving Astronomer and has never publicly addressed the scandal, though he was spotted with his wife in the months after, leading many to believe they’re still together to this day.
Cabot, however, has chosen a different path. Rather than disappearing, she has become involved with organisations tackling online abuse, saying the only thing worse than becoming the internet’s main character would be pretending it never happened.
The memes may never disappear, but Kristin Cabot seems determined to make sure they aren’t the only thing people remember.