Alibaba Cloud Experiences Second Service Outage in a Month: Here’s What You Need to Know – News18
While Alibaba resolved the two outages, tech industy experts raised questions about the reliability of its cloud services.
Alibaba’s cloud service said it suffered a near twohour long disruption affecting customers in mainland China, Hong Kong and the United States on Monday, its second outage within a month.
Alibaba’s cloud service experienced nearly two hours of disruption on Monday, impacting customers in mainland China, Hong Kong, and the United States, marking its second outage within a month.
The disruption predominantly affected several of Alibaba Cloud’s database management products, including PostgreSQL, Redis, and MySQL editions. This incident impacted eight regions, including Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Virginia in the U.S.
Alibaba Cloud stated, “From 09:16 Beijing time (0116 GMT) on November 27, 2023, Alibaba Cloud monitoring detected abnormalities in console and OpenAPI access for database products.” The issue was resolved on the same day at 10:58.
Alibaba holds the largest market share in China’s cloud vendor market, with 29.9% in the first half of 2023, followed by Huawei with 13.2% and China Telecom with 12.2%, according to data from industry research group IDC.
This recent incident follows a previous service disruption on November 12, which lasted over 3 hours and affected a broader range of products and a larger part of the world.
During the November 12 disruption, numerous products including cloud-based database management systems and cloud communication systems were impacted, spanning regions from East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East to North America.
The November 12 disruption caused several of Alibaba’s flagship application services to briefly crash, including the shopping app Taobao and the work collaboration tool service app DingTalk.
While Alibaba addressed both outages, industry experts have raised concerns about the reliability of its cloud services.
Tech expert Feng Ruohang expressed his views in a WeChat blog post, stating, “Such a high frequency of glitches is not reasonable,” with the post garnering over 30,000 views. “This is hugely damaging to Alibaba Cloud’s brand image as a reliable cloud service provider.”
Alibaba announced this month that it was abandoning its original plans to spin off its cloud business due to uncertainties created by U.S. export controls on chips used in artificial intelligence applications.
The e-commerce giant had initially revealed plans to list the unit as part of a broad restructuring, with analysts estimating the cloud division could be worth $41-$60 billion.
(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed – Reuters)
