Facebook cancels large events through June 2021

While various U.S. governors are deciding whether and how to reopen their states’ economies, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has tightened restrictions on gatherings of his employees amid the coronavirus outbreak.

Mr. Zuckerberg said this week that Facebook was “canceling any large physical events we had planned with 50 or more people through June 2021.”

Mr. Zuckerberg said some of the canceled events through June 2021 will be held virtually and the company was extending its policy of no business travel for employees through “at least June of this year.”

“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,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook. “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.”

Mr. Zuckerberg also said the company was “slowing our plans” overall to return its workforce to its offices in order to help others prioritize returning other critical sectors of the economy back to work first.

“Most Facebook employees are fortunate to be able to work productively from home, so we feel a responsibility to allow people who don’t have this flexibility to access shared public resources first,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote. “I hope this helps contain the spread of Covid-19 so we can keep our communities safe and get back up and running again soon.”