Coronavirus Update: Google Calls Off Its April Fools’ Jokes This Year Due To COVID-19 Outbreak

This year, Google is not in a mood to make jokes as people across the world deal with the coronavirus outbreak.

Every year, Google pulls off its April Fools’ jokes on netizens but, this time, it plans to give it a miss.

According to an internal email viewed by Business Insider, in the wake of the coronavirus threat, Google will cancel the tradition of making jokes on April Fools’ “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,” Lorraine Twohill, head of marketing at Google wrote in the email.

She added that the search engine giant has stopped all efforts around April Fools’ but there can be smaller projects within teams that are unaware of this guideline. “Please suss out those efforts and make sure your teams pause on any jokes they may have planned — internally or externally,” she wrote.

Meanwhile, Google CEO Sundar Pichai in his latest message stated that the company is setting aside more than $800 million to support small and medium-sized businesses, health workers, governments and health organizations.

The tech giant has allocated $340 million in Google Ad credits available to small and medium-sized businesses with active accounts. “Credit notifications will appear in their Google Ads accounts and can be used at any point until the end of 2020 across our advertising platforms. We hope it will help to alleviate some of the cost of staying in touch with their customers.”

Google will also provide $250 million in ad grants to assist the World Health Organization (WHO) and close to 100 government bodies globally providing important information on how to avoid the spread of COVID-19.

According to Johns Hopkins University, more than 27,000 people have died because of the coronavirus and 597,304 people have tested positive for COVID-19.