Alibaba Cloud saw a number of its major applications taken offline Sunday – including the shopping platform Taobao and workplace communications tool DingTalk – for approximately 3.5 hours in what was later reported to be abnormalities in its console and application programming interface.
According to the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the problems persisted between 5.44pm and 9.11pm on Sunday 15th November, impacting the company’s cloud storage service as well as numerous popular apps; the disruptions quickly trending on microblogging site Weibo.
Alibaba Cloud, a subsidiary of Alibaba Group Holding, said that the actual operation of most of its other cloud products remained unaffected.
The problem follows on from another major outage suffered by the company last December, when a prolonged system failure saw Alibaba’s Hong Kong and Macau operations disrupted for more than a day.
Alibaba has been making great strides into the AI industry in recent months, in August revealing an open source model capable of responding to image inputs in a similar manner to OpenAI’s ‘GPT-4’ and Google’s ‘Bard’ – the first Chinese model with such capabilities.
In July, Alibaba Cloud became the first Chinese enterprise to support Meta’s open source AI model Llama, marking a significant move for both companies given US restrictions on Chinese firms gaining access to US technology.
The timing of this latest problem could be considered lucky, given Alibaba had concluded its annual Singles’ Day shopping bonanza one day before, though it does come ahead of the company’s financial results due for release this week.
