Is the COVID-19 pandemic leading to a rise or fall in cross-border communication? Despite the extensive travel restrictions and the fear of infections preventing physical contacts between friends and family living abroad, accelerated digitalization might help to maintain international inter-personal relations. Looking at how global communication changed during the 1918 Influenza pandemic provides important insights to answer the above question. Applying a gravity framework to a new database on international bilateral postal flows (letters, parcels, commercial communications) from 1913 to 1922, we find that the 1918 Flu led to a fall in distance and accelerated globalization in terms of communication.