On November 12th, several popular Alibaba platforms and services experienced technical issues, causing widespread disruption and becoming hot topics on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. These services include Taobao, Xianyu, DingTalk, Aliyun Drive etc.
Users took to social media to report instances of "Taobao crashing." Some encountered code display errors on the shopping page, while others faced a blank screen. However, a few users claimed they were still able to shop without any problems.
Multiple services associated with Aliyun, Alibaba's cloud computing subsidiary, also encountered difficulties. Tmall Genie, Aliyun server product console, Taobao messaging system, Ele.me, and Quark were among the affected services. IT Home users suspected that Aliyun Drive experienced server failures on November 12th, preventing users from logging in through both the mobile and desktop versions.
In response to the situation, Aliyun engineers swiftly intervened and launched an urgent investigation into the issues.
At around 6:00 PM on November 12th, Aliyun issued an announcement acknowledging abnormalities in their cloud product console service. The announcement stated that starting from 17:44 (Beijing time), Aliyun's monitoring systems detected abnormal access and API calls to the cloud product console. Engineers began restarting component services in batches, resulting in the restoration of console services in most regions.
Alibaba provided an update around 7:20 PM, stating that their apps, including Taobao, DingTalk, and Aliyun Drive, had fully recovered after emergency handling by engineers.
It is worth noting that the disruptions coincided with the Singles' Day shopping festival, an annual event known for its massive online sales. Some users reported issues with payment on Taobao during this period, which could be attributed to the surge in traffic during the promotional event. The number of active users on the mobile Taobao app exceeded 500 million on the pre-sale day, October 24th, and the total number of buyers reached a new high, according to official sources. This year's Singles' Day saw a double-digit increase in user numbers compared to previous years.
This is not the first time that Aliyun has experienced widespread service failures. On December 18th, 2022, a significant service interruption occurred in Zone C of Aliyun's Hong Kong Region, impacting numerous customer businesses. The incident affected various cloud services, including EBS, OSS, and RDS in Zone C of Hong Kong. Aliyun later released an incident statement, revealing that the extended recovery time due to chiller system failure, untimely on-site handling leading to fire sprinkler activation, and control operation failures, such as customers' new ECS purchases, were among the primary reasons for the prolonged and extensive downtime.
The root cause of this incident is still under investigation and it would be revealed later.
