US firm Vultr takes down Great Fire's FreeWeChat for China's Tencent

The Chinese company Tencent has used the American cloud hosting company Vultr to censor FreeWeChat around the world. Tencent is a hugely influential Chinese company. At the time of this post, it is the biggest public mainland Chinese company by market capitalization, valued at over US $700 billion. It runs WeChat, an app used by approximately 1.3 billion people, which has been called a “Swiss Army knife app”.

This summer, via a number of intermediaries, Tencent recruited Vultr, a Florida-based cloud hosting company owned by The Constant Company, into its global effort to censor our FreeWeChat project. After months of behind the scenes negotiations and requests for transparency, on November 28, 2025, with many of our questions still left unanswered, Vultr closed GreatFire's account at Tencent’s request. In doing so, Vultr acted as Tencent’s vehicle to extend Chinese censorship well beyond the borders of China.

Read the full story at GreatFire.

Safeguard Defenders strongly urge any and all NGOs, individuals, and companies to refrain from using Vultr services, and terminate any existing use of such immediatly.