Facebook has cancelled all of its major events with more than 50 people till June 2021 in light of the global coronavirus pandemic, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, said on Thursday.

“We’re slowing our plans to return to the office in order to prioritise helping the rest of our community and local economy to get back up and running first,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post.

“Guidance from health experts is that it won’t be advisable to have large groups of people get together for a while. Given this, we’re cancelling any large physical events we had planned with 50 or more people through June 2021,” he further added.

Live streaming

The cancellations include major annual events of Facebook including the virtual reality. The social media giant, however, said the company will move certain events online through live streaming.

“Some of these we will hold as virtual events instead and we’ll share more details on that soon,” said Zuckerberg.

The company will also be extending its policy to discontinue all non-essential business travel for employees until this June at the least.

Facebook had earlier cancelled its annual F8 developer’s conference, slated to be held in California on May 5 and 6 owing to the pandemic.

Furthermore, Facebook also said that it will require the vast majority of the company’s employees to work from home through at least May-end due to safety concerns.

A small per cent of Facebook employees may be allowed to return sooner. These are employees who work on essential tasks and include content reviewers working on counter-terrorism or suicide and self-harm prevention, and engineers working on complex hardware.

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