Alibaba Cloud service failure hits shopping app Taobao a day after Singles’ Day, in second major outage in a year
- The 3.5-hour system breakdown also affected other Alibaba apps such as DingTalk, as well as the company’s cloud storage services
- The service interruption deals a fresh blow to Alibaba Cloud, as it strives to become a key provider of computing infrastructure for AI applications
Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing unit of Alibaba Group Holding, has apologised for an outage that led to the service suspension of the Taobao online shopping platform and other main Alibaba apps on Sunday, in the company’s second large-scale system failure in less than a year.
The leading Chinese cloud services provider detected abnormalities in its console and application programming interface at 5.44pm, but managed to restore all services by 9.11pm, roughly three and a half hours later, according to a notice published on the company’s official website.
The disruptions, which also spread to the cloud firm’s distributed messaging and cloud storage services, quickly became trending topics on microblogging site Weibo.
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The “actual operation” of most other Alibaba Cloud products remained unaffected, the company said in its notice.
The service interruption has dealt a fresh blow to Alibaba, owner of the South China Morning Post, as it strives to position itself at the forefront of artificial intelligence (AI) innovation in the country, with Alibaba Cloud being an integral provider of computing infrastructure.