Coronavirus Tracker: How Tech Companies Are Handling COVID-19

Amazon this week told employees that they should work from home until the end of March, if possible. “We continue to work closely with public and private medical experts to ensure we are taking the right precautions as the situation continues to evolve. As a result, we are now recommending that all of our employees globally who are able to work from home do so through the end of March,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement. Job interviews are being conducted remotely.  

Earlier this month, the online retailer confirmed to the New York Times that an employee working in a building in the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle had tested positive for COVID-19 and is now quarantined.

Warehouse workers, however, have reportedly been battling with Amazon over how much (if any) paid sick leave the company will provide. BuzzFeed's Caroline O'Donovan reports that "Amazon sent a note to some warehouse employees today saying that, due to coronavirus, workers won't accrue attendance demerit points for calling out of their shifts if they feel sick. (Amazon employees who accrue 13 points can be terminated.)" 

Meanwhile, shoppers are flocking to Amazon.com itself to buy cleaning supplies, from hand sanitizer to wipes. But Amazon has had to crack down on products that claim to "kill" the virus, and has vowed to prosecute sellers who seek to price-gouge shoppers, Reuters reports. E-commerce rival eBay also banned sales of surgical masks, hand sanitizer, and disinfectant wipes in response to price gouging.

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Early on, Apple was forced to close its retail stores, corporate offices, and contact centers in mainland China, though they have since re-opened. More recently, the problem is production constraints, prompting a shortage of iPhones in stores. And as the virus spreads in the US, CEO Tim Cook said in a memo to staff that employees who can are free to work from home. Hourly workers will also get unlimited sick leave if they start feeling ill, 9to5Mac reports.

In late February, Apple said it did "not expect to meet the revenue guidance we provided for the March quarter" due to these constraints and the temporary store closures in China. Apple's iPhone manufacturing partner sites are coming back online, but they are "ramping up more slowly than we had anticipated, [so] these iPhone supply shortages will temporarily affect revenues worldwide."

Apple was rumored to be hosting a March event to launch a new "budget" iPhones and new iPads, but those supply constraints plus a ban on gatherings of more than 250 people have likely put that on hold for now. Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), usually held in June in San Jose, will be an online-only event. To help businesses that will be hurt by the conference's absence, Apple will donate $1 million to local San Jose organizations, it says.

Apple is now trying to avoid approving misleading apps in its App Store. Developers tell CNBC that Apple has been rejecting coronavirus-related apps, but Apple is reportedly prioritizing apps from reputable organizations like hospitals or government agencies.

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Foxconn, which makes Apple iPhones among other devices, was forced to shut down factories due to the outbreak, but it expects to return to full operation by month's end.

“As of today, the production resumption rate has reached 50 percent of seasonal capacity,” Foxconn Chairman Young Liu said on Tuesday. “Based on the current schedule, we should be able to reach full seasonal capacity by the end of March.”

Despite that upbeat outlook, Liu nevertheless said the coronavirus is still creating “uncertainties” for the company’s business at a time when researchers are trying to understand the disease. Foxconn has one factory in Wuhan, China, which has been ground zero for the outbreak. But it's responsible for less than 1 percent of the company’s total revenue. Other Foxconn manufacturing sites in the country resumed normal operations two weeks ago.

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Facebook is allowing employees to work from home, though as The Intercept notes, that's not always possible for some third-party contractors. The social network has canceled its annual f8 developers conference, and on the platform itself, Facebook is battling bad information spread amongst its billion-plus users.

"It's important that everyone has a place to share their experiences and talk about the outbreak, but as our community standards make clear, it's not okay to share something that puts people in danger," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. "So we're removing false claims and conspiracy theories that have been flagged by leading global health organizations. We're also blocking people from running ads that try to exploit the situation—for example, claiming that their product can cure the disease." Those rules apply to Instagram, too.

Facebook is, however, offering the World Health Organization (WHO) "as many free ads as they need for their coronavirus response," Zuckerberg said.

Don't look to Facebook to purchase masks and other items, however. "We are temporarily banning advertisements and commerce listings, like those on Marketplace, that sell medical face masks," Facebook said last week. "We’ll begin to enforce this change over the next few days."

(Photo by Josh Edelson / AFP) (Photo by JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images)

Google has also been forced to cancel its big I/O developers conference, which usually features developers from around the globe showing off their latest Android innovations and seeing what's in store for the next version of Google's mobile operating system. “This was a tough call to make,” said Google Director Konstantinos Papamiltiadis. "But we need to prioritize the health and safety of our developer partners, employees, and everyone who helps put F8 on.”  

According to CEO Sundar Pichai, "some of our offices have shifted to a work-from-home status ensuring business continuity, while others are still operating as normal. As we make these changes, we have been making sure that our hourly service vendor workers in our extended workforce who are affected by reduced work schedules are compensated for the time they would have worked."

In terms of product updates,  President Trump said on Friday that Google is creating a website that’ll tell you where you can get tested for the coronavirus. Google has yet to comment on the project. But according to Trump, the company has committed 1,700 engineers to building the website.

Google is also working to expand its Knowledge Panels for health conditions to include a COVID-19 panel, Pichai writes in a blog post. "On YouTube, we are working to quickly remove any content that claims to prevent the coronavirus in place of seeking medical treatment." The company has also blocked "tens of thousands" of ads that exploit the coronavirus over the last six weeks, and provided the World Health Organization (WHO) and government agencies $25 million in donated ad credit.

G Suite and G Suite for Education customers globally, meanwhile, will get free access to advanced Hangouts Meet video-conferencing capabilities until July 1, allowing for up to 250 participants per call, live streaming for up to 100,000 viewers within a domain, and the ability to record meetings and save them to Google Drive.

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Microsoft has also been forced to make its Build developer conference an online-only event. Build was scheduled to be held in Seattle, which is dealing with a serious outbreak. In fact, two Microsoft employees have tested positive for coronavirus, Bloomberg reports. One works out of its Redmond headquarters; the other works remotely for Microsoft-owned LinkedIn. As a result, Microsoft has asked California- and Washington-based employees who can work from home to do so.

These decisions, of course, impact hourly workers who provide services to employees who are no longer coming into the office; like those who "work for our vendors and staff our cafes, drive our shuttles and support our on-site tech and audio-visual needs," Microsoft Brad Smith said in a Thursday blog post. "As a result, we’ve decided that Microsoft will continue to pay all our vendor hourly service providers their regular pay during this period of reduced service needs. This is independent of whether their full services are needed."

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Six people working in and around Samsung's factory in Gumi, South Korea, have tested positive for coronavirus, so the company has been forced to shut down the facility twice in order to disinfect it (rival LG has had to do the same in Gumi). Reuters reports that Samsung will move some of its production to Vietnam temporarily, though it expects the Gumi factory to resume production soon. The facility makes smartphones for the US and Korean market, and PCMag has visited several times over the years.

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Twitter has instructed all of its employees across the world to work from home. In a blog post, the social media company said that it had moved past “strongly encouraging work from home” and is now making it mandatory. Although some people may not be able to fulfill all their duties while working from home, Twitter said that it will continue to pay them while these travel restrictions are in effect.

On its platform, meanwhile, Twitter says it's seeing COVID-19 related Tweet every 45 milliseconds, while #Coronavirus is now the second most used hashtag of 2020. 

"We’ve seen that verified people on Twitter are about 2.4x more likely to participate in COVID-19 conversation than non-verified people, and 75 percent of COVID-19 related Tweets are actually Retweets. In other words, the primary method of sharing information during a time of crisis is through Retweeting," according to Alex Josephson and Eimear Lambe from the Twitter brand strategy team, who offered advice to brands trying to thoughtfully navigate the coronavirus discussion on Twitter.

For regular users, Twitter expanded a search prompt feature "to ensure that when you come to the service for information about COVID-19, you are met with credible, authoritative content at the top of your search experience. We have been consistently monitoring the conversation on the service to make sure keywords — including common misspellings — also generate the search prompt."

At the RSA Conference,  the US State Department suggested Russia was secretly controlling thousands of fake accounts to spread disinformation about the coronavirus outbreak on social media. Twitter says it's "not seeing significant coordinated platform manipulation efforts around these issues. However, we will remain vigilant and have invested substantially in our proactive abilities to ensure trends, search, and other common areas of the service are protected from malicious behaviors."

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Are you among those stuck working from home?  If you're new to working remotely, these tips from a home-office pro can help you stay productive and maintain balance. And maybe read our primer on how to clean your electronics for good measure.