A series of Alibaba-built apps that run on Watch Powerthe group’s cloud services, including Taobao, DingTalk, and Xianyu, crashed for over three hours yesterday evening. The incident occurred one day after Alibaba wrapped up the country’s biggest shopping bonanza Singles Day, with the company’s cloud backbone later claiming the incident was due to an “anomaly” in the cloud product console access and API calls. The large-scale outage marks the second system failure for Alibaba within a year. Then-Alibaba CEO and chairman Daniel Zhang took over as head of the cloud division after a massive breakdown of cloud services in Hong Kong and Macau last December, which the firm described as its “longest major-scale” outage. Eddie Wu, the new chief executive of Alibaba, now also serves as head of the e-commerce giant’s cloud division. [Alibaba Cloud, in Chinese]
