Executives from Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd's cloud division have been summoned by Shanghai authorities in connection with a theft of police data on Chinese citizens, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.

Based on scans of the police database, cybersecurity researchers concluded that the stolen data of nearly 1 billion Chinese citizens was hosted on Alibaba's cloud platform, according to the report.

Alibaba did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Since the theft was discovered, Alibaba has temporarily disabled all access to the breached database and launched an inspection, the report said.

  - Reuters