The company will begin today by making most of its US job openings eligible for remote hires and begin taking applications for permanent remote work among its workforce later this year.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: "We're going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale. We need to do this in a way that's thoughtful and responsible, so we're going to do this in a measured way. But I think that it's possible that over the next five to 10 years -- maybe closer to 10 than five, but somewhere in that range -- I think we could get to about half of the company working remotely permanently."

Facebook has more than 48,000 employees working in 70 offices worldwide and is the largest company yet to move aggressively into remote work in the wake of the pandemic.