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

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.

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.