Social media has been abuzz in recent times, and that’s primarily been due to the outbreak of coronavirus. In a bid to stop the spread of the disease from person to person and country to country, employees of businesses around the world have been told to work from home instead of going into an office. This includes employees working for the world’s biggest social media platform, Facebook.
Those same employees were told on Tuesday that Facebook would provide them all with a $1,000 bonus in an effort to deal with the fallout of the virus. Many staff members have been waiting out the pandemic, and it was CEO Mark Zuckerberg who spoke of the bonuses being handed out to staff, explained within an internal note.
The Facebook company employs about 45,000 workers on a full-time basis around the world, according to its January financial filing. At the same time, it employs many thousands more as contract workers. For the moment, it is unclear if those same contractors will be on the receiving end of that same $1,000 bonus. Yet, Facebook isn’t the first tech company opting to provide its workers with a cash bonus. Workday also announced that it will give cash bonuses equating to two weeks’ worth of pay for its employees.
As well as announcing the $1,000 bonus for its employees, Facebook said on Tuesday that it has a $100 million program in place to help small businesses that are being impacted by the COVID-19 outbreak. Through this program, up to 30,000 eligible small businesses will be able to garner cash grands and ad credits.
The Impact of Coronavirus on the Industry
Coronavirus has had quite the effect on companies and lives around the world already. This has included the cancellation or postponement of multiple entertainment events and sporting occasions. The Olympics, which are supposed to be held in Japan a little later this year, are still up in the air. This has, of course, led to a decrease in sports bets being placed, although multiple sportsbooks are still doing what they can to provide such options to consumers. To find an online sports betting site that works for you, then you could visit the Silentbet website, which compares and contrasts such sites.
Shares of Facebook are 28% down at the moment in a year-to-date scenario, and the company had to cancel its F8 annual software developers conference on February 27, too. It was at the beginning of March that Facebook started informing its employees that it would be in their best interests to work from home, and the company then went on to pull out of other conferences, too. Additionally, the brand took to temporarily banning ads and listings for medical face masks.
The world has already experienced more than 183,000 cases of coronavirus, with over 7,000 people having died from the disease. Around 4,500 of the confirmed cases of the virus have been on victims in the United States, and at least 85 people have lost their lives to it.
