Oliver Haslam on March 29, 2020, 1:26 am

Google Cancels April Fools’ Day And Hopefully It Isn’t The Only One

Search and ad giant Google is normally pretty big on April Fools’ Day jokes, But this year it’s decided to skip it given the current coronavirus situation. And hopefully Google isn’t the only company to take that decision.

This news comes after Business Insider got its hands on an internal email. Google said that it 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.”

Of course, Google is so huge that there is a chance that something will slip through. Google said that it’s stopped all jokes that were “centralized” but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t more obscure works still coming.

“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,” the email from Google’s Lorraine Twohill said. “Please suss out those efforts and make sure your teams pause on any jokes they may have planned — internally or externally.”

This is clearly the best approach to take here and we can only hope that everyone else follows suit. There’s a school of thought that April Fools’ Day is something that should have died a death long ago and this year might be our chance to make that happen.