San Francisco — After Microsoft, Facebook has cancelled all physical conferences and events it had planned with 50 or more people through June 2021. It includes the Oculus Connect 7 virtual reality conference in San Jose.
According to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, some of these will be organized as virtual events instead.
“We will share more details on that soon. Similarly, we’re extending our policy of no business travel through at least June of this year as well,” Zuckerberg said in a statement late Thursday.
“We will require the vast majority of our employees to work from home through at least the end of May in order to create a safer environment both for our employees doing critical jobs who must be in the office and for everyone else in our local communities,” Zuckerberg added.
Microsoft has already announced to make all its events – internal as well as external – digital-only till July 2021.
Zuckerberg said Facebook is slowing plans to return to the office in order to prioritize helping the rest of the community and local economy to get back up and running first.
“A small percent of our critical employees who can’t work remotely, like content reviewers working on counter-terrorism or suicide and self-harm prevention, and engineers working on complex hardware, may be able to return sooner, but overall, we don’t expect to have everyone back in our offices for some time,” informed Zuckerberg.
Most Facebook employees are fortunate to be able to work productively from home, he said, adding that Facebook has a responsibility to allow people who don’t have this flexibility to access shared public resources first.