- An outage at ride-hailing ginat Didi’s resulted in an estimated loss of around CNY400 million ($56 million).
- Many users incurred job-related losses due to transportation delays, which are incalculable.
- On the same day, Alibaba Cloud had an issue.
DiDi, China’s massive ride-hailing app, went down for 12 hours on Monday, resulting in an estimated loss of over CNY400 million ($56 million) for it and its users. The reasons have been blamed on “software”.
Didi outage hits users
A day later, issues related to DiDi became trending searches during the morning rush hour. Topics included “DiDi taxis unavailable,” “DiDi drivers: 1952 kilometers apart from passengers,” and “all staff disappeared,” among others. This system crash started on the evening of November 27 and persisted through the following morning.
DiDi issued a statement, announcing that the technical team had resolved the issues overnight. DiDi’s online ride-hailing and other services have been restored to normal, and users can download the DiDi application to use the taxi services. However, many users reported persisting “abnormal network loads,” and location information inaccuracies. Some users even experienced location data indicating they were in Europe.
Didi’s business scope extends beyond ride-sharing to include bike-sharing services, such as Qingju. This system crash also impacted the operations of Qingju. Despite the company’s announcements, users experienced issues with inaccurate location data and difficulties in unlocking bikes when using the bike-sharing service. DiDi stated that any losses incurred as a result of this situation would be covered by the company.
According to a report from Min media, despite DiDi bearing the losses related to transportation expenses, a significant number of users still expressed frustration. They reported that due to traffic delays leading to tardiness, their full attendance bonuses mysteriously vanished in an unexpected manner by the end of the month.
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This outage is anticipated to result in losses exceeding CNY400 million
DiDi’s latest third-quarter report reveals a notable performance in its tourism business in China. The revenue from the tourism sector for this quarter reached CNY46.6 billion, with a total transaction volume of CNY72.5 billion. The total number of travel orders reached 2.78 billion, indicating an average daily revenue of CNY606 million. The transaction volume and order quantity were CNY780 million and 31.28 million, respectively.
However, the recent system failure has incurred certain losses for Didi. Preliminary estimates suggest that if the system downtime lasts for 12 hours, it could result in Didi losing approximately 16 million orders, around 250 million CNY in revenue, and a transaction volume of 400 million CNY.
DiDi has consistently been the dominant force in China’s ride-sharing market. In 2018, it commanded an impressive 91% market share in the country’s ride-sharing sector. According to research by Statista, 80% of Chinese users expressed a preference for DiDi over other competitors.
Despite DiDi attributing the malfunction to issues with the data center network, as of now, detailed specifics about the root cause of the system failure have not been disclosed.
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Alibaba cloud services outage
On November 27, 2023, Alibaba Cloud experienced its own outage lasting nearly two hours, affecting customers in mainland China, Hong Kong, and the United States. This marked the second interruption within a month, with the previous incident occurring on November 12 and lasting over three hours. The recent disruption primarily impacted Alibaba Cloud’s database management products, including PostgreSQL, Redis, and MySQL versions. The company addressed the issue on the same day. The frequency of these interruptions has raised concerns about the reliability of Alibaba’s services, with experts questioning the brand’s image as a dependable cloud service provider.
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However, at present, there is no evidence to suggest that these two outage incidents are related.
