Facebook, Intel, Twitter drop out of SXSW amid disease concerns
Organizers say event still will be held on set dates
The South by Southwest conference set to start next week in Austin, Texas is going to be missing some big Bay Area companies that have pulled out of the multimedia event due to fears about the spread of coronavirus.
Facebook and Intel have both said they will not attend SXSW because of the rise in coronavirus cases in the United States. Those companies are following the lead of Twitter, which said on Monday that it will also not appear at SXSW this year.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had been scheduled to be a featured speaker at SXSW prior to the company instituting a ban on nonessential business travel over the weekend. Twitter is also “strongly encouraging” its employees to work from home.
“Due to concerns related to coronavirus, our company and employees will not be participating in SXSW this year,” said Anthony Harrison, a Facebook spokesperson.
An Intel spokesperson echoed Harrison’s comments, saying the semiconductor giant chose to withdraw from SXSW “after careful consideration” of the coronavirus situation.
SXSW said the conference will still go forward as planned from March 13-22. The event is one of the best-known, and biggest conferences involving music, video and sessions on technology, with more than 73,000 attendees last year. More than 25% of those conferencegoers came from outside the U.S.
But, while SXSW intends to run as usual, a grassroots petition at Change.org has so far gathered more than 31,000 signatures calling upon event organizers to cancel the conference.
As coronavirus has spread to the U.S., and cases are expected to increase around the Bay Area, tech companies, in particular, are re-evaluating their positions on attending large events with thousands of attendees from the U.S. and abroad. On Monday, Nvidia cited coronavirus concerns for cancelling its GTC conference that was to be held from March 2226 at the San Jose Convention Center.
Organizers have also pulled the plug on the annual Game Developers Conference that had been scheduled for March 16-20 at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, and Facebook cancelled its F8 developers conference more than two months before it was to kick off in San Francisco in early May.
Among the notable tech conferences that are currently still going ahead with their Bay Area plans are the IoT World event, which is scheduled for April 6-9 at the San Jose Convention Center, and IBM’s Think 2020 event that will be held from May 4-7 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.