Twitter made an announcement on Monday advising its staff to work from home.

This made Twitter the first major US corporation to tell its employees to work from home to avoid spread of coronavirus.

Twitter’s human resources chief Jennifer Christie, in a blog post said it was mandatory for staff in Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea to work remotely.

Jennifer also revealed that the social media giant is “strongly encouraging” all of its 5,000 employees around the world not to come to their offices.

Her blog post reads ;

“Beginning today, we are strongly encouraging all employees globally to work from home if they’re able.

“Our goal is to lower the probability of the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus for us — and the world around us.

“While this is a big change for us, we have already been moving towards a more distributed workforce that’s increasingly remote.

We’re a global service and we’re committed to enabling anyone, anywhere to work at Twitter.”

Large tech companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple have said that they are restricting travel to and from China.

Google’s restriction also includes Japan, South Korea, Iran and Italy. Amazon and Salesforce have both frozen all nonessential business travel indefinitely.

Many companies with offices and retail outlets in China, such as Apple, Google, and Facebook, have either closed them temporarily or asked employees to work from home.