Bulletins

Yahoo is pulling out of China, following LinkedIn and Fortnite

Yahoo is ending its few remaining operations in China.

Yahoo is pulling out of China, following LinkedIn and Fortnite

Yahoo is the latest of several U.S. tech companies to end operations in China.

Image: Yahoo and David Pierce

Yahoo is ending its few remaining operations in China, following on the heels of similar announcements from LinkedIn and Epic Games' Fortnite, as the country's new strict regulations over data and gaming go into effect.

"In recognition of the increasingly challenging business and legal environment in China, Yahoo's suite of services will no longer be accessible from mainland China as of November 1," the company said in its announcement. The Yahoo! search website was already blocked in China, and its Beijing office closed in 2015.

Microsoft's LinkedIn announced it would be ending its effort to provide a social site in October for similar reasons, while Epic Games gave no reason for Monday's announcement that it will close access to the platform for users in China in two weeks.

That leaves Apple as one of few U.S. tech companies operating in the country. Apple removed several religious apps from the App Store in China in October and cooperates with Chinese censorship laws.

The new Chinese data regulation requires a security assessment from a government authority, as well as certain contractual clauses about the government's access to people's personal data and restrictions on where that data can be stored. The new gaming law attempts to prevent anyone under 18 years old from playing more than three hours of video games a week.

Anna Kramer

Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (Twitter: @ anna_c_kramer, email: akramer@protocol.com), where she writes about labor and workplace issues. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.

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