Yahoo Inc. is shutting down operations in China due to an “increasingly challenging business and legal environment,” The Wall Street Journal reports.
As of Nov. 1, Yahoo’s suite of services are “no longer…accessible from mainland China,” a Yahoo spokesman tells the Journal, which notes that on the same day, China’s Personal Information Protection Law went into effect. The new privacy law from Beijing is meant to “curb data collection by technology companies,” the Journal says.
Yahoo has been steadily shutting down operations in China since 2013, when Yahoo Mail got the heavo-ho in the region. For the last 15+ years, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. has handled (and gradually axed) most of Yahoo’s Chinese operations, the Journal says.
The move comes after Microsoft shut down its LinkedIn service in China last month, citing factors including the country’s strict regulations on content moderation. “We’re also facing a significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements in China,” LinkedIn’s VP of Engineering, Mohak Shroff, said at the time.
This week, Epic Games also announced that it’s shutting down the Chinese version of Fortnite on Nov. 15 after a limited test that started in 2018.
