SXSW canceled due to coronavirus fears

AUSTIN, Texas — Officials in Austin, Texas, say South by Southwest arts and music festival has been canceled over virus fears.

The conference was canceled Friday, with officials calling it a medical- and data-driven decision.

SXSW, as it’s known, had vowed to go on, despite recent developer conferences that were canceled by Facebook and Amazon.

In the past week, more major players at the festival, including Apple, Netflix, Twitter and Google, all officially announced their decision to withdraw from the festival citing concerns over the coronavirus.

The 10-day festival was set to begin March 13.

The festival issued an official statement on its website and via social media on Friday hinting that there might be an “online experience” in the making or possibly a rescheduling of the entire event.

The conference this year had several high-profile speakers in place, including former presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton, Beto O’Rourke and Andrew Yang and Steve Jobs’ widow Laurene Powell Jobs and rockers Ozzy Osbourne, director Judd Apatow and to Kim Kardashian West. Nearly 300,000 people attended in 2019. Osbourne announced on Thursday that he would no longer be attending.

Beyond the losses to the festival, Texas Monthly points out caterers, ride-hailing drivers, bartenders and servers, tech crew and security staff, and many other rely on SXSW, the biggest event of the year in Austin, to pay their bills.

According to the Austin Statesman, public health officials had said that canceling the conference didn’t make sense, because many of the people who already made travel arrangements were likely to come to Austin anyway even if it SXSW was called off.

But some festivalgoers were not too keen on attending the annual event. A change.org petition calling for the cancellation had more than 55,000 signatures as of late Friday afternoon.

Read more at usatoday.com; Contributing: Associated Press