Yesterday, netizens discovered that the few remaining online services of Yahoo had also stopped. Yahoo’s weather app, news pages and the Chinese version of the technology media Engadget were all inaccessible. In recent years, Yahoo has almost disappeared from people’s sight, but yesterday, a “Yahoo stopped operating products in mainland China” appeared on the hot search, which aroused heated discussions among Chinese netizens.
Yahoo! USA announced on Tuesday (November 2) that the company had officially stopped all its services in mainland China on November 1. But it does not affect Yahoo’s products and services in other parts of the world.
According to Yahoo’s statement, users in mainland China can only access data in Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, and Privacy Dashboard from three given URLs.
This is followingMicrosoftAfter its subsidiary LinkedIn (Linkedin) closed its social networking site in China, in less than a month, it was the second well-known American technology company to scale down its business in China.
Yahoo is the world’s number one search portal in the past and the pioneer of Internet portals. Its business covers 24 countries and regions around the world and has more than 500 million users.
It is understood that the Yahoo China website was opened in 1999; Yahoo Software Research and Development (Beijing) Co., Ltd. was established in 2008, and was subsequently cancelled on July 18, 2017; in 2013, China Yahoo’s mailbox, information and community services ceased, and the original team turned to Alibaba. Public welfare; In 2015, Yahoo closed its Beijing Global R&D Center and laid off hundreds of employees.
Yahoo used to be the earliest cultivator of the Chinese Internet market. It inspired the first generation of portal entrepreneurs such as Sohu, Sina, and NetEase. Yahoo’s first 1G e-mail address launched in China in July 2004 was also known as “open” at the time. The G era of Chinese e-mail”.
In the 21st century, domestic search engines began to rise, search service providers such as Baidu, but Yahoo’s decline gradually began to appear, and the number of users in China began to shrink. At that time, Yahoo invested 1 billion yuan to host Yahoo’s business in China to Alibaba, but the facts proved that this kind of “nanny-style hosting” was not suitable. At the same time, it also encountered operating difficulties. In 2015, the stock price continued to fall, and in 2017 it sold its core business to the American communications giant Verizon. At present, 90% of the company’s equity is held by an investment fund managed by Apollo Global Management, and 10% is held by the US communications giant Verizon.
It is worth mentioning that Yahoo’s closure of its few remaining online services in China on Monday coincided with the promulgation of China’s “Personal Information Protection Law.” Yahoo also said that the shutdown of Chinese services is related to the increasingly stringent domestic policies on data protection and supervision.
In fact, the previous 2017 Cyber Security Law and the Data Security Law implemented in September this year have introduced a series of measures to restrict cross-border data flow and implement data localization.
But presumably Yahoo’s decline in China cannot be overwhelmed by a law.
Time is like an arrow. In the torrent of technological trends, Yahoo’s exit is ultimately embarrassing.