Google’s 20th anniversary April Fool’s Day joke is being postponed until next year due to the widespread coronavirus pandemic.
According to Business Insider, Google emailed workers that this year April 1 will be like any other day with no hoaxes.
This is due to concern over the COVID-19 pandemic, Forbes reports. Spreading any kind of misinformation would be insensitive to those fighting the disease and even misleading at a time when people are relying on them to provide them with accurate information about the disease, according to Forbes,
But the jokes will be returning next year, CNET reports.
For the past two decades, Google has been releasing ads for a fake product or false reports on April 1 as part of their April Fool’s Day joke tradition, according to Hoaxes’ Google’s April Fool Day Hoaxes archive.
The tradition started with “MentalPlex,” a fake technology that could supposedly read your mind and do a search rather than making you type it out, and culminated last year with Google Tulip, an AI flower that could translate words from “Tulipish” into various human languages, Yahoo! News reports.