Qihoo 360 Cloud Drive announced on Thursday that it would close its cloud storage services for individual users. The decision was made in the face of the storage and transmission of pirated and adult-only content, which the team had failed to prohibit.
According to the announcement, 360 Cloud Drive will transform itself to serve corporate users, and cloud services for individuals may not come back until issues regarding copyright infringement and illegal content transmission are solved.
From this November 1st, individual users can no longer update or save files using 360 Cloud Drive; from the February of 2017, all individual users’ data will be cleared. Membership fees will all be refunded in full amount before next February. This is also the deadline for users to download their own updated files through PC Software, web pages, or mobile platforms.
From this March, Chinese authorities have launched a series of campaigns against the spread of illegal content via cloud drives, and 360 Cloud Drive was among those involved.
Due to the rampant transmission of illegal or pirated content, bringing with it the possibility of being sued, several cloud drives have decided to either transform or close their services for individual users, including UC Cloud, Huawei Cloud, and Tencent Weiyun.
Baidu posted a response on Weibo to 360’s move, promising that it will continue to provide individual cloud services – though Baidu Cloud took the strategy of attracting users with free service, something that 360 also did, and may have found it too unprofitable.