Alibaba CEO takes over cloud business from unit head after major service breakdown in Hong Kong
- Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang is now the acting president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, after the company’s cloud services suffered a major service outage last week
- In a letter from Zhang to the cloud business unit, he said Alibaba Cloud could not afford to lose the trust of its clients
Daniel Zhang Yong, also Alibaba’s chairman, is now the acting president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence and enterprise communications app DingTalk, while Jeff Zhang Jianfeng has stepped down as cloud business chief, the company said on Thursday.
In a letter from Daniel Zhang to staff at the cloud business unit, seen by the Post, the CEO said Alibaba Cloud could not afford to lose the confidence of its customers.
“Once the trust is gone, our clients will leave us,” he wrote. “A service breakdown might be a rare incident at Alibaba, with a low probability of 0.01 per cent or even 0.0001 per cent, but once it happens, it has 100 per cent happened to our clients.”
He did not directly mention the outage in Hong Kong and Macau on December 18, which stretched for more than 24 hours at some customer sites, suspending withdrawals at cryptocurrency exchange OKX and disabling the website of the Monetary Authority of Macau.
Alibaba, owner of the South China Morning Post, did not respond to a request for comment.