Cloudfest, which is arguably the biggest single event for the hosting and cloud industry, has fallen victim to COVID 19 and been cancelled.
The annual event which is held in Southern Germany normally attracts over 7000 attendees from the four corners of the globe. From my own experience if you work in hosting and domains then it is “the” event to attend every year, as pretty much every vendor you deal with will have a presence. Not so this year, however.
The event organisers announced this morning that the 2020 event has been cancelled. The decision is completely understandable and comes as multiple events across Europe, Asia and North America have been cancelled, while parts of Italy are currently in lockdown.
Earlier this week several companies including 1 and 1 and Key Systems announced that they would not be attending. Furthermore several companies have now implemented policies restricting their employees travel to “essential” only.
The announcement from Cloudfest may come as a surprise to some, as the organisers had previously stated that they intended to proceed with the event after taking some precautions. However it looks increasingly like 2020 will be the year when many industry events will be either cancelled outright or postponed:
Due to public health concerns related to the coronavirus outbreak, we saw no alternative but to cancel CloudFest 2020. The health and safety of our attendees, partners, presenters, and colleagues is of the utmost importance to us. We were forced to consider the growing risk of exposure, especially in the German state of Baden-Württemberg, where our event is located.
The unclear infection path, as well as the risk of quarantine orders lasting several weeks on short notice, could not be ignored. With over 7,000 people from the Cloud community expected to gather from almost every continent, the risk of inadvertently spreading the virus was just too high.
We know that this news will bring frustration as well as a few challenges, and we hope you understand why we arrived at this decision. We’re grateful to our partners for their support and cooperation.
Cloudfest will be offering attendees refunds for tickets, transport and hotels that were booked via their reservation platform. For travel and hotels booked via other systems it’ll be up to the travellers to make their own arrangements. They’ve published a comprehensive FAQ on their site here.
