Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday that his company has canceled all large group events through June 2021 and will allow employees to continue working from home as late as this summer so others who are unable to telecommute during the coronavirus pandemic “get back up and running first.”
“Guidance from health experts is that it won’t be advisable to have large groups of people get together for a while,” he said in a statement addressing Facebook’s reopening plans as several states discuss how they will eventually reopen businesses.
Facebook, which employs nearly 45,000 people across 70 cities globally, according to its website, will allow the vast majority of its workers to continue to work from home until at least the end of May to allow others to access shared public resources first, Zuckerberg said.
Those who feel they cannot come into the office, whether it’s because they are in a vulnerable population or have child care issues, will be able to work from home at least through the summer, he added.
The company is also extending its policy of no business travel through at least June of this year.
“We’re slowing our plans to return to the office in order to prioritize helping the rest of our community and local economy to get back up and running first,” he said. “I hope this helps contain the spread of Covid-19.”
Details of Facebook’s internal plans came the same day the social media site announced that it is taking new measures to stop the spread of misinformation about COVID-19, specifically by alerting users who interacted with a Facebook post that was found to contain bad info.
The company has already put warning labels over articles, posts or videos in users’ feeds that have been marked as false or misleading by fact-checkers. It said Thursday that it put warning labels on 40 million coronavirus-related posts in March alone.
