An announcement at Amazon’s Spheres, a set of conservatories on its property in Seattle, that visits by guests will be limited. Credit...Miles Fortune for The New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO — At Facebook on Thursday, the questions from spooked employees came thick and fast.
The evening before, the social network had disclosed that the coronavirus had been diagnosed in a contractor in its Seattle office and had said all employees in that city should work from home until March 31.
Other Facebook employees, some of whom had recently traveled for work, soon began asking their managers and one another: Who was the contractor? Had that person been near them? And what did that mean for their work?
That same alarm has now spread through other companies around the world, despite escalating efforts by many of the firms to deal with disruptions from the coronavirus outbreak that started in China. Microsoft, Amazon, Ford Motor, CNN, Citigroup and Twitter have put employees through work-from-home drills, dusted off emergency-response plans and ordered increasingly stringent safety measures to protect their workers.
Even so, the coronavirus has moved faster than their preparations. Amazon said this week that two employees in Europe, who had been in Milan, were infected with the virus and that one employee at its Seattle headquarters had tested positive for it. HSBC said on Thursday that the coronavirus had been diagnosed in an employee at its global headquarters in London. And AT&T said a retail employee at one of its stores in San Diego had tested positive.
The challenges faced by workplaces have become a new front in the battle over the coronavirus, which has spawned more than 90,000 cases and caused more than 3,000 deaths around the world. While factories in China had already been closed by the outbreak and are now just ramping back up, global white-collar companies have rarely grappled with this scale of disruption — or the level of fear that has gripped workers.
“No one has a playbook for this,” said Dan Levin, who runs a small company outside Chicago, Cain Millwork, which makes furniture and wall paneling. He said he was planning to have some of his office employees work from home.
Many corporate memos, including those from HSBC and Facebook, now mention deep cleaning of office spaces and self-quarantining. Face-to-face job interviews have been all but banned by some firms, in favor of interviews conducted by teleconference.
At Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Wash., near a cluster of coronavirus cases, employees swapped stories this week about the outbreak in internal chat rooms. In one online conversation on Wednesday, which The New York Times reviewed, a Microsoft employee wrote of a rumor that someone at headquarters had been infected.