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Alibaba Cloud’s recent outage in Hong Kong raises alarm on infrastructure risks as more firms shift tech workloads online

  • The Alibaba subsidiary has pledged to ‘make compensation’ based on its service agreements with the affected companies
  • Its system failure in Hong Kong shows that cloud services providers cannot guarantee 100 per cent uptime, analysts say

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Alibaba Cloud has pledged to compensate the companies affected by the recent system failure based on their service agreements. Photo: Shutterstock Images
Coco Fengin BeijingandTracy Quin Shanghai
The system failure experienced by Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing subsidiary of Alibaba Group Holding, between Sunday and Monday in Hong Kong – with disruptions at some user sites stretching to more than 24 hours – has raised the alarm on internet infrastructure risks in the city and in neighbouring Macau.

Such a prolonged breakdown of cloud services could cause losses at the businesses of clients, according to Audrey Jiang, chief analyst at the research centre of software development information provider InfoQ.

The incident, which happened at the internet data centre of Alibaba Cloud’s Hong Kong partner PCCW, resulted in the suspension of withdrawals at major cryptocurrency exchange OKX and disabled the website of the Monetary Authority of Macau. OKX, one of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchanges by trading volume, first reported the problem at 11am on Sunday and announced the resumption of operations at noon on Monday.

Other businesses that had their websites and apps affected by the system failure include Galaxy Macau Resort, Lotus TV Macau and food delivery platform mFood, according to a post by Macau’s Judiciary Police on microblogging service Weibo. These operations had all resumed by Tuesday morning.
Alibaba Cloud, also known as Aliyun, is the largest cloud computing services provider in mainland China. The Alibaba Group Holding subsidiary’s international operations are headquartered in Singapore. Photo: Shutterstock
Alibaba Cloud, also known as Aliyun, is the largest cloud computing services provider in mainland China. The Alibaba Group Holding subsidiary’s international operations are headquartered in Singapore. Photo: Shutterstock

In a statement posted on its Hong Kong website on Monday, Alibaba Cloud pledged to “make compensation” based on its product or service agreements with the relevant customers. Parent Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

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