Google is holding off on its traditional annual April Fool’s Day jokes until next year “out of respect for all those fighting the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Many will be restraining themselves this April Fool’s Day from the usual pranks, jokes and mischievous behavior because of the solemn state of the planet due to the spreading coronavirus… and Google is leading the charge.
Google will “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,” according to an internal email from Google’s head of marketing Lorraine Twohill obtained by Business Insider.
“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.”
Among last year’s Google April 1 pranks: Google Tulip, an app which allowed the user to talk with a tulip; and Google Spoon Bending, a smart spoon that allows users to type Japanese characters in Gboard by bending it.
As of midday Saturday, there were over 600,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus globally and more than 28,000 deaths.