Communications service Slack wants to offer the use of European servers from 2018

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield has announced that from 2018 the service will offer users the option to store data in Europe instead of in the US. With this, the service wants to attract more European customers.

The decision would stem from the wishes of many customers, Heise reports based on statements by Butterfield to the German news agency DPA. The offer should be available from 25 May. That is also the day on which the new General Data Protection Regulation comes into effect, which introduces a European system of privacy rules. According to Slack, its offer must therefore comply with the new rules from that moment on.

Slack isn’t the only company moving supply to Europe. For example, competitor Microsoft said at the end of 2015 that there will be data centers in Germany. In Microsoft’s case, the data centers would be transferred to a new company to keep them out of the hands of the US government. It is not yet clear how Slack organizes its offer.

The communications service is said to have about six million daily users, half of whom are located outside the US. Earlier this month, Slack raised a $250 million investment, leading investors to estimate the application’s value at $5.1 billion. The investment came from, among others, the Japanese SoftBank. Microsoft made its Teams chat service widely available in response to Slack earlier this year.