Alibaba Cloud's second outage in a month sparks reliability concerns
Alibaba Cloud, the leading cloud vendor in China, experienced a service outage lasting nearly two hours on November 27. This affected customers in mainland China, Hong Kong, and the United States and is the second outage within a month for the company. Alibaba Cloud, a subsidiary of Alibaba Group, holds a 29.9% market share in the first half of 2023. Huawei and China Telecom trail behind at 13.2% and 12.2%, respectively, as per IDC data.
The outage impacted Alibaba Cloud's database management products
The disruption on November 27 primarily impacted Alibaba Cloud's database management products like PostgreSQL, Redis, and MySQL editions. Services were disrupted in eight regions, including Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Virginia in the U.S. In a statement on its website, Alibaba Cloud said that "from 09:16 Beijing time on November 27, 2023, Alibaba Cloud monitoring detected abnormalities in console and OpenAPI access for database products." The issue "was resolved at 10:58 on the same day."
Another outage happened on November 12
An outage on November 12 caused several of Alibaba's flagship application services to crash for a short time. The list of impacted services includes its shopping app Taobao and work collaboration tool DingTalk.
Concerns over reliability of Alibaba Cloud services
Following these outages, tech experts have questioned the reliability of Alibaba Cloud services. Tech expert Feng Ruohang wrote in a WeChat blog post, "Such a high frequency of glitches is not reasonable. This is hugely damaging to Alibaba Cloud's brand image as a reliable cloud service provider." The e-commerce giant recently scrapped plans to spin off its cloud business due to uncertainties caused by US export controls on chips used in artificial intelligence applications.
