Facebook cancels F8 Developer Conference 2020 due to coronavirus

Facebook has announced the cancellation of its in-person component of F8 Developer Conference 2020 due to the growing concerns around coronavirus – COVID-19. The conference was scheduled to take place on May 5 and 6 in McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California. Around 5,000 people attended last year’s event

According to Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, Director, Platform Partnerships at Facebook App in a recent blog post,

Every year, we look forward to connecting with our global developer community at F8 and sharing our vision for the future that we’re building together. But given the growing concerns around COVID-19, we’ve made the difficult decision to cancel the in-person component of F8 2020.

This was a tough call to make — F8 is an incredibly important event for Facebook and it’s one of our favorite ways to celebrate all of you from around the world — but we need to prioritize the health and safety of our developer partners, employees and everyone who helps put F8 on. We explored other ways to keep the in-person part of F8, but it’s important to us to host an inclusive event and it didn’t feel right to have F8 without our international developers in attendance.

We remain committed to the city of San Jose, where we’ve hosted F8, and its community. Every year, we donate a portion of F8 ticket sales to an organization working to diversify the tech industry. This year, we’re doubling that donation amount to $500,000 and will prioritize organizations serving local San Jose residents. We also typically host local students onsite at F8. Working with the next generation of developers is one of the highlights of what we do — and this year, we will still provide an F8-inspired experience for those students in lieu of hosting them at the event itself.

In place of the in-person F8 event, we’re planning other ways for our community to get together through a combo of locally hosted events, videos and live streamed content. We’ll share additional details on our plans for F8 in the coming weeks. Sign up here to have updates emailed to you directly. In the meantime, thanks for your patience and understanding — and we look forward to seeing our global community of developers at F8 2021!

The GSMA already cancelled the Mobile World Congress scheduled to hold in February due to the same coronavirus pandemic.