Yahoo Leaves China Permanently, Cites ‘Challenging Environment’

Popular American web service, Yahoo, has announced that it has stopped allowing access to its services from China.

The company said the move was as a result of the “increasingly challenging business and legal environment” in the country, reports Reuters.

The exit makes Yahoo the second Western tech brand to leave the country recently, following LinkedIn’s exit last month, after its parent company, Microsoft Corp, decided to pull the plug on the social network’s operations there.

LinkedIn attributed the exit to a “more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements in China.”

Yahoo had been scaling back its presence in China over the past few years. Prior to Monday, it had still operated a weather app and some pages that showed news articles in foreign languages.

Yahoo entered China in 1998 and in 2012 struck a deal with Alibaba Group to sell its stake in the e-commerce giant. The deal also saw Alibaba obtain the right to operate Yahoo China under the Yahoo brand for up to four years.

Yahoo China later shut its email service and web portal but the brand retained a global research and development center in Beijing until 2015, when it was shut down.