Salesforce’s Slack to Stop Direct Service in China, Farm Out to Alibaba

Salesforce’s Slack has told customers in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan that they must migrate their accounts to partner Alibaba Group before February, if they want to continue with instant-messaging service, according to a Slack customer in mainland China and an Alibaba Cloud employee.

The move is in response to a privacy and data security law that came into effect this year in mainland China, according to the Alibaba employee, adding that Alibaba has started helping Slack customers with the change in recent days.

Some Slack customers with billing addresses in these four regions were told earlier this week that their subscriptions wouldn’t be renewed, according to the Alibaba employee. They were told they could maintain access by buying the service through Alibaba Cloud, according to emails reviewed by The Information.

A Salesforce spokesperson said that “Slack workspace creation and user provisioning are not currently supported in all markets. Our paid customers can provision individual user access for employees working anywhere legally permitted.” Alibaba didn’t reply to a request for comment.

Salesforce and Alibaba announced a strategic partnership in 2019 in which Alibaba would be the exclusive cloud provider of Salesforce services in these four regions, but that agreement wasn’t put into full practice until the recent days.

Salesforce is the latest U.S. company to separate its Chinese customer service, after Zoom in 2020 and Microsoft’s LinkedIn in 2021 began working with local partners or replaced their services with a local product,  underscoring the deepening technological divide between the U.S. and China as companies increasingly operate on separate networks.