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Alibaba’s Taobao runs into 20-minute system breakdown as presales for Singles’ Day festival kick off
- The system crash, which was fixed within 20 minutes, also affected Qianniu, a platform for merchants to manage their online stores
- Taobao said the breakdown was caused by heavy traffic generated by ‘overenthusiastic’ consumers after presales started
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Taobao Marketplace, China’s biggest online shopping platform, experienced a 20-minute system breakdown on Wednesday evening, as the Alibaba Group Holding subsidiary kicked off presales for the annual Singles’ Day festival in November.
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The system crash, which was fixed within 20 minutes, was attributed to heavy traffic generated by “overenthusiastic” consumers soon after Alibaba kicked off the presales period for the world’s largest shopping event, according to a Taobao statement posted on Chinese microblogging site Weibo.
Hangzhou-based Taobao said it received reports from consumers and merchants at around 8:10pm on Wednesday that the online marketplace and Qianniu, a platform for merchants to manage their online stores, had stopped functioning.
The brief system collapse occurred amid a major initiative by e-commerce giant Alibaba, owner of the South China Morning Post, to increase engagement with both consumers and online merchants.
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Alibaba’s new Zhongcao initiative, a 40-day content-heavy marketing campaign, was rolled out on October 1 across Taobao’s different channels, including live-streaming platform Taobao Live, to bolster the company’s sales initiatives for Singles’ Day.
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