Google, like a lot of other tech companies, has a tradition of making April Fools’ Day pranks. This year, the company has called off its plans due to the coronavirus pandemic, according to an email obtained by Business Insider.
“Under normal circumstances April Fool’s is a Google tradition and a time to celebrate what makes us an unconventional company. This year, we’re going to take the year off from that tradition out of respect for all those fighting the Covid-19 pandemic. Our highest goal right now is to be helpful to people, so let’s save the jokes for next April, which will undoubtedly be a whole lot brighter than this one.”, wrote Google’s head of marketing Lorraine Twohill.
“We’ve already stopped any centralized April Fool’s efforts but realize there may be smaller projects within teams that we don’t know about. Please suss out those efforts and make sure your teams pause on any jokes they may have planned — internally or externally.”, she added.
Google’s timely decision to call off its April Fools’ pranks is indeed applaudable and we hope other tech companies do the same this year as the coronavirus pandemic is showing no significant signs of slowing down with over 724,000 confirmed cases and 572,00 active cases at this moment.
Google has taken several steps to reduce the impact of the novel coronavirus. The company recently launched a dedicated coronavirus hub and pledged over $800 million in addition to the previously announced $50 million.
Also, the software giant entirely canceled its annual developer conference Google I/O 2020 and is actively monitoring coronavirus-related apps on its app store to fight misinformation.
