Twitter is “strongly encouraging” all its 5,000 employees around the globe to work from home. The change will be mandatory for employees in Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea, partly due to government restrictions in those three countries. In an announcement made on Monday, Twitter’s Chief HR Officer Jennifer Christie said that the social media company’s goal is to lower the probability of spreading the Covid-19 virus within and around its workforce.

“We also have the responsibility of ensuring that the health and safety of our employees and partners is not compromised,” Christie wrote. However, she added that Twitter’s offices will remain open as the nature of some employees’ jobs do not allow them to work remotely. The company is also stepping up its cleaning and sanitization routines, and plans to offer pre-packaged food options to those employees who still have to come into the office.

Twitter is not the only tech company to suggest and even enforce a work-from-home requirement, but its response to the outbreak is one of the more cautious to date. Google instructed all 8,000 employees in its Dublin office to work from home on Tuesday after one employee came down with flu-like symptoms, although this was not confirmed to be a Covid-19 case. Earlier last week and the week before, Microsoft, IBM, and others had also asked employees located in virus-hit regions to work from home, although employees in other locations did not receive the directive.

Many of the tech companies’ work-from-home directives are open-ended to date, reflecting uncertainty about how the outbreak will progress. However, given the nature of these companies—global, distributed, with remote work already fairly common—there is a strong possibility that even after Covid-19 has died down, remote work will continue to be the new norm for the industry. In Twitter’s case, Christie had already indicated as much in her Monday announcement: that the company was already preparing to significantly scale up the number of its employees working remotely, and the outbreak has simply hastened its plans.