Social media company Facebook has donated $1.3 million to the museum at Bletchley Park, the center of the Allied code-breaking effort during World War Two.
The donation will help the museum continue after it was forced to temporarily close down and cut dozens of jobs owing to the virus pandemic.
The English country house and estate in Buckinghamshire in southeastern England was the center of the Allies' efforts to decrypt messages sent by Nazis using their Enigma cipher. The success of the code-breaking team, led by mathematician Alan Turing, was believed to have resulted in the Allies winning the war.
British code-breakers built the world's first computer. Facebook said it was fitting for it to help out the venue where the "era of the computer was born."
"Like too many of our favorite places, it has been hit hard by a drop in visitors and revenue this year, pushing it toward difficult decisions about its future," Facebook's chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer said in a blog post.
Owing to shelter-at-home orders and lockdowns, the museum was unable to operate for several months. On its website, Bletchley Park said it expected a loss of more than $2.6 million this year. It plans to dismiss around a third of its staff.
Schroepfer said Facebook would likely never exist were it not for the efforts of the men and women at Bletchley Park. He said Turing's work had inspired thousands of engineers and scientists - including those that work at Facebook and other technology companies around the world. Turing's work during the war was also the subject of an Academy Award-winning film released in 2014 titled "The Imitation Game."
Bletchley Park said on Twitter the donation would help the trust with the financial effects of the pandemic.
