Alibaba Cloud Experiences Another Service Interruption – Twice in One Month!

Alibaba’s cloud service said on Monday it suffered a nearly two-hour outage that affected customers in mainland China, Hong Kong and the United States, the second outage in a month.

The impact was mainly felt in several Alibaba Cloud database management products, including versions of PostgreSQL, Redis, and MySQL. Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Virginia in the United States were among the eight regions.

“At 9:16 a.m. Beijing time (0116 GMT) on November 27, 2023, Alibaba Cloud monitoring detected anomalies in the console and OpenAPI access of database products,” Alibaba Cloud said in a statement posted on its website on Tuesday. The issue was “resolved at 10:58 a.m. the same day.”

Alibaba is China’s largest cloud services provider, capturing 29.9% of the market share 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.

The latest issue comes after the company’s customers suffered a service outage on November 12. This lasted over 3 hours and affected a wider range of products and affected many more parts of the world.

Dozens of products affected during the outage included cloud-based database management systems and cloud communication systems, while the affected areas ranged from East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East to North America.

The November 12 outage caused many of Alibaba’s flagship app services to crash for a while — including shopping app Taobao and work collaboration tool service app DingTalk.

Alibaba resolved the two outages, but technology industry experts raised questions about the reliability of its cloud services.

“Such a high frequency of disruptions is not reasonable,” tech expert Feng Ruohang wrote in a WeChat blog post on Monday that garnered more than 30,000 views. “This will greatly damage Alibaba Cloud’s brand image as a reliable cloud service provider.”

Alibaba said this month it was abandoning initial plans to spin off its cloud business amid uncertainties over US export controls on chips used in artificial intelligence applications.

The e-commerce giant had originally announced plans to list the unit as part of a sweeping restructuring, and analysts had estimated at the time that the cloud business could be worth between $41 billion and $60 billion.