LinkedIn Pauses New Member Sign-ups in China

Microsoft Corp.’s professional networking site LinkedIn is pausing new member sign-ups for its service in China while it works to ensure it’s in compliance with local law.

The company gave out a statement on Tuesday concerning the new member sign-ups issue;

“We’re a global platform with an obligation to respect the laws that apply to us, including adhering to Chinese government regulations for our localized version of LinkedIn in China.”

LinkedIn, which entered China in 2014, is one of the few U.S. social networking companies allowed in the country as it has agreed to restrict some content to adhere to state censorship rules.

Currently, the service has 52 million users in Mainland China. Other social media platforms like Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc. have long been banned.

“Microsoft has a long torturous history in China,” said Adam Segal, director of the digital and cyberspace policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations. He pointed to Microsoft’s long-running business in the country and China’s antitrust probe against the company in 2014.

The announcement comes a week after Microsoft said state-sponsored hackers based in China were behind a massive attack on its Microsoft Exchange Server product that has claimed at least 60,000 victims.

The Microsoft Exchange account is a work or school e-mail account, which runs on the Windows Server operating system. The threat was identified by the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Centre as a Chinese state-sponsored threat actor, called Hafnium.

Hafnium, which operates from China, is a highly-skilled and sophisticated actor, which primarily targets entities in the US for the purpose of exfiltrating information from a number of industry sectors, including infectious disease researchers, law firms, higher education institutions, defence contractors, policy think tanks and NGOs.

China may be signaling displeasure over Microsoft blaming the country for the attack, Segal said. “There could be compliance issues in how they’re registering people, but I haven’t seen any reporting in the Chinese press to suggest that there was something coming down the pike.”

In a statement, LinkedIn said the move isn’t related to the recent Microsoft e-mail hack.