Coronavirus Outbreak: Twitter staff to work from home over virus fears

Twitter staff across the world were asked to work from home starting Monday by the company, in an effort to stop the spread of the coronavirus epidemic.

The latest development comes a day after the firm banned all non-essential business travel and events for its workers.

The social media platform’s decision to ask its staff to avoid the office follows similar requests by governments in virus hotspots.

Twitter’s head of human resources Jennifer Christie said in Monday blog post: “Our goal is to lower the probability of the spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus for us – and the world around us.”

“We are strongly encouraging all employees globally to work from home if they’re able”, she further added.

Working from home will be mandatory for employees at the company’s South Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan offices, Christie said.

The company also said it was “strongly encouraging” all of its 5,000 employees around the world to not come into work.

The post also highlighted that Twitter has been developing ways to work from home for some time.

“While this is a big change for us, we have already been moving towards a more distributed workforce that’s increasingly remote. We’re a global service and we’re committed to enabling anyone, anywhere to work at Twitter”, said the post.

The Twitter company had already announced that it was pulling out of this month’s South by Southwest media conference in Austin, Texas.