COVID-19's impact on tech this week: cancelled conferences, supply chain and sales disruptions, murky business outlook for online travel firms, and rise of Zoom

Companies are telling investors that sales are slumping because of the outbreak, conferences are being canceled, and workers are being instructed not to travel.

New York Times 2020-03-02 Mike Isaac

Context & Ripple Effects

The outbreak's toll on tech had already reached China's factories and forced MWC's attendance collapse, as tracked in the Verge's coronavirus impact roundup in early February. What changes in this week's reporting is that the damage crosses the Pacific: US companies are pulling out of conferences, banning employee travel, and warning investors about slumping sales — while Zoom's usage climb shows the same disruption cutting both ways.

First-order effects

Conference organizers cancel events and companies instruct workers not to travel, immediately hitting the event, airline, and hospitality revenue that tech's calendar depends on.
Online travel firms face a murky booking outlook, and Zoom gains users and market position as remote meetings substitute for the cancelled trips.

Second-order effects

The pain lands hardest on the travel-adjacent startups that raised a record $7.9B+ in 2019 on the strength of booking platforms and lodging brands — the exact categories now facing COVID-19-related cuts, a slump that deepens as bookings fall and Airbnb moves to refund guests more easily.
Hardware and component buyers feel the supply chain disruptions in quarterly guidance, forcing companies to re-plan launches around factory closures rather than demand.

Third-order effects

If Zoom's rise holds, the shift to remote work becomes durable rather than temporary — a structural change the year-end coverage of tech companies benefiting from the new normal confirms — while startups broadly absorb layoffs, halted IPOs, and price cuts as the downturn spreads.
The tech conference circuit faces a longer-term question about whether large physical gatherings justify their cost when remote attendance has been normalized.

The trend: The pandemic is accelerating tech's pivot from physical presence — conferences, business travel, offices — to remote software and distributed work, with Zoom an early beneficiary and travel-dependent firms the early casualties.

Discussion

Twitter Twitter on x
Keeping our employees and partners safe during #coronavirus
@mckaycoppins McKay Coppins on x
“Roughly 2 million tweets peddled conspiracy theories about the coronavirus over the three-week period when the outbreak began to spread outside China, according to an unreleased report from an arm of the State Department” https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
@danprimack Dan Primack on x
Some unfortunate news: I will no longer be interviewing @jack at @SXSW, as Twitter has suspended all “non-critical” biz travel due to coronavirus. https://www.axios.com/...
@thekenyeung Ken Yeung on x
With tech companies banning non-essential travel (Amazon, Twitter, etc), I'm thinking that soon SXSW will announce it'll be canceled. https://www.axios.com/...
@kyweise Karen Weise on x
Amazon SVP @davehclark wrote in an email to his org that no group or team meetings requiring travel should be planned until at least the end of April, “by which time hopefully we have a better sense of the virus, its spread and impact.”
@jasonthinks Jason on x
I'm glad I got to work on a fighting game and on Minecraft before the end. Please say nice things about me after I'm gone. https://twitter.com/...
@ericnewcomer Eric Newcomer on x
Travel is going to be impeded globally so Airbnb is surely going to be harmed. 15% of Uber's gross bookings are airport trips. That's likely going to go down. And people who think US food delivery will benefit with consumers staying home — GrubHub's CEO isn't so sure https://twit…
@kyweise Karen Weise on x
Yesterday Amazon told employees of its at largest org (worldwide ops) to stop all foreign and ~~domestic~~ travel “until further notice” because of coronavirus, according to emails I saw. Tucked a bit of news into @MikeIsaac's newsletter https://www.nytimes.com/...
@kantrowitz Alex Kantrowitz on x
“Sorry, we have not even started framing this ourselves yet,” a top tech analyst told me, re: Coronavirus impact. “Have to pass.” https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ...
@nmoekijat Ninik Moekijat on x
Google employee has tested positive for the coronavirus. The employee was at the Zurich office. Google is restricting employee travel to Italy, Iran, Japan, South Korea, which have all seen a spike in COVID19 cases.Uber also restricted employee travel. https://www.cnbc.com/...
@balajis Balaji S. Srinivasan on x
Given the complexity and physicality of Amazon's business, this could not have been an easy decision. This is probably the signal for every VC and pure software company to stop travel and go to remote work. https://www.businessinsider.com.au/ ...

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