Austin has declared a health emergency, and SXSW has been canceled on the advice of local health experts who have warned that it could cause coronavirus (COVID-19) to spread. The festival was scheduled to take place from March 13th to March 22nd, yet Austin Mayor Steve Adler festival today announced that, amid a increasing number of high-profile speaker and company withdrawals, the festival will no longer be taking place.
SXSW typically draws well over 100,000 people from around the world, and up until today, the organizers had planned to keep the event going despite multiple companies pulling out.
For weeks leading up to the event, there were growing concerns about whether it was a smart decision for Austin leaders and the festival organizers to host SXSW, which brings nearly half a million people to a concentrated section of the Texas city’s downtown. The situation became more complicated as US coronavirus cases began spiking in Washington state, where there have so far been 11 reported deaths, and rapidly spreading to other parts of the country, including California and New York.
SXSW is just the latest industry conference to get postponed or cancelled due to concerns of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. The Game Developers Conference, Mobile World Congress, Facebook’s F8 developer conference, Google’s Cloud Next conference and I/O developer conference, and countless other events have been similarly effected, with organizers either postponing the physical meetups, transitioning to “virtual” events held online and through videoconference, or cancelling events outright.
