Alibaba Cloud service failure hits shopping app Taobao a day after Singles’ Day, in second major outage in a year

Alibaba Cloud, which is part of the Alibaba Group, had to apologize because their cloud computing services had a big problem. This issue caused the Taobao online shopping platform and other important Alibaba apps to stop working on a Sunday. This was the second major system failure in less than a year. They noticed something was wrong at 5:44 PM, but they managed to get everything back to normal by 9:11 PM, which took about three and a half hours. The problem affected some of Alibaba's most used apps, like DingTalk for work communication, Xianyu for trading second-hand goods, and Taobao, which had just finished its yearly Singles' Day sale the day before. These apps were back up at around 7:20 PM. The issues also hit Alibaba's messaging and cloud storage services and became a hot topic on Weibo, a social media site. However, most other Alibaba Cloud products were still working okay. Alibaba is a key player in China's tech industry, providing cloud services to 80% of the country's tech companies and many AI firms. They aim to be a leader in AI innovation and support the digital transformation of numerous industries. This service interruption follows a previous outage in Alibaba Cloud's Hong Kong and Macau operations last December, which lasted over 24 hours. After that incident, the then-chairman of Alibaba Group took charge of Alibaba Cloud, but later handed over leadership to a new CEO in September. Alibaba Cloud has had other service failures in the past, in March 2019 and June 2018. The company, which plans to go public as part of Alibaba Group's restructuring, saw a 4% revenue increase in the June quarter, while the group's revenue grew by 14%. Alibaba is about to announce its earnings for the September quarter on Thursday.