China’s Alipay Recoups Following Site Outage

Alipay, the Chinese online payment platform, was offline for roughly two and a half hours Wednesday (May 27), which has raised questions about the site’s existing backup and contingency protocols, Caixin Online reported Thursday. The company is owned by Ant Financial Services Group, which is in turn tied to Alibaba Group Holding.

Alipay has said it helped process an average of 10 billion yuan in transactions on a daily basis last year, and estimates that it has 70 percent share of the country’s third-party payment market. And earlier this month, retail giant Walmart began rolling out Alipay’s mobile option across 25 of its stores in China, with an eye toward expansion in the near future.

But, regardless of the growth of Alipay and all the positive press it has received in recent months, several of Alipay’s users were quite displeased with the company for those two and a half hours this week.

At around 5 p.m. local time in Hangzhou, where Alipay is based, online shoppers began to find they could not use the site for payments, and several would-be consumers stated phone calls to the company’s service center went unreturned.

Caixin Online reported that a social media account linked to Alipay Wallet, a smartphone payment service, stated that the site’s failure was caused by cables severed at a Hangzhou construction site.

Other social media sites chimed in to state that cables were eventually repaired, that Alipay was planning to switch to other servers and that service was restored at about 7:30 p.m.

However, noted Caixin, Alipay’s – or indeed any online site’s — outage could represent “a major security incident,” according to an unnamed source. Chinese state regulations require reporting of any outage lasting more than a half hour. Backup servers are de rigeur at large tech and data companies, reported Caixin, and analysts stated that banks typically have multiple, and separate, server centers – which enables switchovers within minutes. Those analysts questioned why it would have taken so long for Alipay to switch over to other servers.

The company does indeed have backup servers in place, Caixin reported, pointing to an interview with an unnamed commercial bank technician. Another analyst said Alipay may have been concerned that backup servers would have been overwhelmed by real-time data, and opted instead to eventually get back online.

After service was restored, Alipay said in an 11 p.m. announcement that it chose not to switch over to other servers due to “concerns” over user data and money security – and also stated it was “unsatisfied” with the time it took to get back up and running and would seek to improve its technology processes. In response, Caixin reported analysts offered a potential solution: that Alipay consider simultaneous use of servers across different telecom networks.

 
To check out what else is HOT in the world of payments, click here.