Critical infrastructure operators’ websites & apps ‘temporarily unavailable’ due to Alibaba’s cloud failure: police
The Judiciary Police (PJ) said in a statement yesterday that the websites of ”critical infrastructure operators” such as the Macau Monetary Authority (AMCM), hotel-casino resort operator Galaxy Entertainment Group (GEG), Lotus TV Macau and Macau Cement Manufacturing Company Limited, food delivery platforms such as Aomi and mFood, and local media mobile apps such as Chinese-language newspaper Macao Daily News were “temporarily unavailable” from noon yesterday due to a node failure in Alibaba Cloud’s computer room in Hong Kong.
Alibaba Cloud (also known as Aliyun in Putonghua) is a cloud computing company, a subsidiary of Alibaba Group, that provides cloud computing services to online businesses and Alibaba’s own e-commerce ecosystem. Its international operations are registered and headquartered in Singapore. Alibaba Cloud, which is the largest cloud computing company in China and the Asia Pacific region according to US technological research and consulting firm Gartner, operates data centres in 24 regions and 74 availability zones around the globe, according to Wikipedia.
Yesterday afternoon’s statement noted that the Judiciary Police had contacted the affected critical infrastructure operators to follow up on the incident.
According to a statement by Alibaba Cloud yesterday, the node failure was caused by a refrigeration equipment fault in the computer room of PCCW-HKT Data Centre, which affected the use of multiple cloud products.
The statement noted that engineers of both companies were expediting processing, and some refrigeration equipment had been restored.
As of 11 p.m. yesterday some of the websites and mobile apps of the affected Macau’s “critical infrastructure” operators, such as mFood, Aomi, and Macao Daily News were still unavailable.
This screenshot taken from Macau’s mobile app of mFood last night shows its website still being unavailable at that time.
