COVID-19 update: supporting our employees and community

As the COVID-19 (coronavirus) outbreak has evolved, the health and safety of our employees and community remains our top priority. We know millions of developers and customers around the world depend on GitHub, and we take this responsibility seriously. So, to support our employees and community—and do our part to help contain the spread of COVID-19 globally—we’re taking the following steps:

Employee health

• We’ve decided to pause all non-essential domestic and international business travel for our teams around the world. We’ll revisit this position in the coming weeks as we learn more from the Centers for Disease Control and World Health Organization. 
• We’re a distributed global team, and we’ll continue to work together the same way we’ve always worked—virtually, asynchronously, and on GitHub. Our offices will remain open, but if employees who work in one of our offices or coworking spaces would prefer to work from home during this time, we support that decision. As a distributed company since our inception, we already have systems in place for fully remote work. 
• We also ask that any employee who is sick take time off to rest and that all employees follow preventative practices like frequent hand washing, avoiding touching their faces, and practicing social distancing.
• We’re conducting preventative cleaning and sanitization in our San Francisco and European offices, and we’re currently assessing all GitHub offices (including coworking spaces) to minimize the risk and respond quickly in the event the virus is detected.

Community health

• We’re switching our GitHub Satellite conference this year from a physical, in-person event to a virtual event on May 6, 2020. While there are many benefits in bringing our community together in real life, given the uncertainty of the spread of the virus over the coming months, we’ve decided to focus our efforts on hosting an exceptional virtual event that will help our developers, maintainers, customers, partners, and employees learn and get inspired, without being in the same room. We’ll share more details soon.

Learn more about preventing COVID-19 spread

We hope these decisions prevent any disruptions to your experience using GitHub or meeting IRL. We’ll continue to monitor COVID-19 around the world and global health organizations’ recommendations to help keep our community and employees safe as news develops.

Written by

Erica Brescia

@ebrescia