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produced by radar finance hongtu | edited by mo enmeng | deep sea

alibaba cloud disk, which claims to be "secure", has failed due to a privacy and security bug.

on september 14, several users reported that they could see other users' private photos by creating a picture-type folder on alibaba cloud disk. some netizens lamented that they did not expect that such a seemingly low-level product failure would actually occur on alibaba's star product, alibaba cloud disk.

looking back, this is not the first time that alibaba cloud disk has gone wrong.according to incomplete statistics from radar finance, alibaba cloud disk was unable to be used normally twice last year alone. alibaba cloud, the company behind alibaba cloud disk, has experienced several major failures in the more than ten years since its establishment.

among them, the most influential one was the partial service failure incident in the hong kong region of alibaba cloud in december 2022. ten days after the incident, the president of alibaba cloud was changed from zhang jianfeng to zhang yong. many people outside speculated that this personnel change of alibaba cloud may be related to the aforementioned incident.

although alibaba cloud has topped the list of china's big data platform public cloud service market rankings released by idc for many years in a row, the second-quarter financial report recently released by alibaba revealed the challenges faced by the cloud intelligence group in its development.

judging from the revenue structure of alibaba’s second quarter report, the contribution of the cloud intelligence group to the group’s total revenue has declined compared with last year, and its revenue share ranking in alibaba’s six major business groups has dropped from second place in the same period last year to fourth place.at the same time, the revenue growth rate of cloud intelligence group is not outstanding among various business groups.

aliyun disk bug reveals private photos of strangers

on the last working day before the mid-autumn festival, some alibaba cloud disk staff may have been "frightened".

on the evening of september 14, many netizens posted on social platforms that alibaba cloud drive had a bug that caused a worrying privacy leak. these users said that they could accidentally access other users' private photo collections by simply creating a new folder in alibaba cloud drive and selecting pictures when categorizing.

after this bug in alibaba cloud disk was discovered and shared on social media, it sparked heated discussions among many netizens. some netizens joked, "alibaba cloud disk: withdrawing a mid-autumn festival holiday..." compared with the previous jokes, more netizens expressed their concerns. some netizens called it a "disaster-level" bug in alibaba cloud disk, and some netizens directly called out "don't be too outrageous!" some netizens also said, "i dare not use it again in the future."

regarding this product accident, an alibaba cloud disk staff member responded, "we have received feedback from other users about this type of problem and have reported it to the relevant departments." as for the cause of the bug and the scope of affected users, the staff member said it was not clear at the moment.

later, alibaba cloud disk customer service said that the aforementioned problem had been verified and handled as soon as possible, and it had been repaired on the same day. as for whether users whose private photos were leaked would receive corresponding compensation, customer service said that feedback needed to be sent to a dedicated person for processing.

radar finance found that this incident was not the first time that alibaba cloud disk encountered a technical failure. on the evening of february 3, 2023, due to a system failure, alibaba cloud disk was temporarily unable to be used normally. subsequently, alibaba stated that the failure had been repaired at 23:50 that night and would not affect users' data and subsequent use.

on july 22 of the same year, due to system jitter, alibaba cloud disk was once again inaccessible, with the app, web page, pc client, and tv client all unable to load content. about 20 minutes later, alibaba fixed the problem.

radar finance learned that alibaba cloud disk is a network disk product created by alibaba's global technical team. as an intelligent cloud storage product created by the alibaba cloud team, alibaba cloud disk can provide c-end users with secure storage backup and intelligent photo album services.

in october 2020, alibaba cloud disk started internal testing. in march of the following year, alibaba cloud disk officially started public testing. after youku cloud photo album service was shut down in 2022, alibaba cloud disk took over some of its users and files. in 2023, dingtalk announced that it would shut down dingpan's private file storage service and adjust it to be provided by alibaba cloud disk.

it is worth mentioning that in the introduction of the official website, alibaba cloud disk lists fast speed, no interruption, sufficient security, and easy sharing as its product highlights. alibaba cloud disk also mentioned that the product is backed by alibaba cloud storage technology, and data security is guaranteed. through various powerful backup capabilities and unique data encryption technology, users' files can be safely stored in the cloud disk.

some network security workers believe that the failure of alibaba cloud disk directly touched the sensitive nerves of users regarding privacy protection and data security, which is not only a red line that cloud service providers cannot cross, but also the cornerstone of maintaining user trust. users choose cloud storage, which is essentially a high degree of trust in the service provider's technical strength and privacy protection commitment. once a data leak or privacy violation occurs, it may lead to a significant drop in user trust and may even cause large-scale user loss.

there have been many failures

despite being backed by the internet giant alibaba and enjoying strong technical support and resource background, alibaba cloud disk is not the only product under alibaba cloud that has experienced major technical failures. in the past development history, alibaba cloud has experienced many failure accidents.

back in june 2018, alibaba cloud's official website suddenly encountered a large-scale access anomaly problem, and the image service and user login functions were blocked. in response, alibaba cloud officially explained: "an operational error in our operation and maintenance caused some customers to have problems accessing the alibaba cloud official website console and using some product functions."

in march 2019, another netizen said on weibo that alibaba cloud was suspected of having a downtime accident, and this failure affected many internet companies in north china. in response, alibaba cloud said that some ecs servers and other instances in availability zone c in north china 2 had io hang (no response from the cloud server's disk), which was gradually restored after emergency investigation and processing. for this failure, alibaba cloud will handle compensation as soon as possible according to the sla agreement (service contract).

fast forward to december 2022, and alibaba cloud has once again "run into trouble". because some services in the alibaba cloud hong kong region failed, many service projects hosted in the region became inaccessible. according to media reports, the failure lasted from more than 8 a.m. to more than 10 p.m. before it was finally restored. the entire failure lasted for more than ten hours.

subsequently, alibaba cloud released an announcement stating that after investigation, it was confirmed that the failure in the alibaba cloud hong kong region was caused by a failure of the refrigeration equipment in the hong kong pccw computer room, affecting the use of cloud products such as the cloud server ecs, cloud database, storage products (object storage, table storage, etc.), cloud network products (global acceleration, nat gateway, vpn gateway, etc.) in availability zone c in the hong kong region.

when reviewing the incident, alibaba said frankly, "the service outage in zone c of the hong kong region had a significant impact on the businesses of many customers. it was also the longest-lasting large-scale failure in alibaba cloud's operations over the past decade."

it is worth mentioning that about 10 days after the aforementioned failure, alibaba cloud made a major personnel adjustment. zhang jianfeng, who previously served as the president of alibaba cloud, was no longer in charge of alibaba cloud intelligence group, and was replaced by zhang yong, then chairman of the board and ceo of alibaba group.this change has caused widespread speculation in the industry, and many analysts believe that this move may be related to the failure of some services in the alibaba cloud hong kong region.

at that time, zhang yong said in his first internal letter as president of alibaba cloud intelligence, "our millions of customers include startups, large enterprises, government agencies, and public service departments. our business type determines that we must regard customer trust as our life. once trust is lost, customers can leave us at any time."

according to zhang yong, alibaba cloud was recognized as the no. 1 in asia and no. 3 in the world at that time. zhang yong also said in the letter that any failure that occurs to alibaba has a probability of one in ten thousand or one in a million, but once it happens to every customer, it is 100%.

before zhang yong had served as president for a full year, alibaba cloud welcomed a new leader. in september last year, zhang yong resigned as chairman and ceo of cloud intelligence group and handed over the baton to the group's new ceo wu yongming. this change marked that alibaba cloud has once again entered a new stage.

however, on the second night after the double 11 promotion last year, alibaba cloud once again had a "rollover" accident. according to netizens' actual measurement, the scope of the failure covered alibaba cloud, alibaba cloud disk, taobao, tmall, xianyu, ele.me, dingtalk and other alibaba applications.

it is reported that the crash situations of these applications are different. some applications cannot be logged in, some application pages are blank, and some applications display 404. subsequently, many topics including "all alibaba products have crashed", "taobao has crashed again", "xianyu has crashed", "dingding has crashed", "ali cloud disk has crashed", etc. have become hot searches.

according to a subsequent announcement released by alibaba cloud, starting at 17:44 beijing time on november 12, 2023, alibaba cloud monitoring found abnormalities in cloud product console access and api calls, and alibaba cloud engineers were urgently involved in the investigation. by 21:11 that day, all affected cloud products had been restored. based on this calculation, the entire failure lasted nearly three and a half hours in total.

in fact, this failure of alibaba cloud not only affected domestic users, but also affected international users in some overseas regions.according to the official alibaba cloud status website, the areas affected by the failure on november 12 were not limited to china, but also affected many overseas regions including the united kingdom, south korea, and japan.

less than a month after the aforementioned failure, alibaba cloud encountered another challenge. on the 27th of the same month, alibaba cloud experienced abnormalities in access to the cloud database console in some regions. starting from 09:16 on the same day, alibaba cloud monitoring found abnormalities in console and openapi access to database products in beijing, shanghai, hangzhou, shenzhen, qingdao, hong kong, china, and the east and west regions of the united states. after emergency processing by engineers, the access abnormality was restored at 10:58 on the same day.

“with great power comes great responsibility”

as an important part of alibaba, alibaba cloud has been around for 15 years. in september 2009, at the 10th anniversary celebration held by alibaba group, alibaba cloud was officially launched.

it is reported that alibaba cloud will focus on research and development in the field of cloud computing, with the goal of building the first platform for internet data sharing and becoming an advanced data-centric cloud computing service company.

according to alibaba's recently released financial report, cloud intelligence group has performed well in alibaba group's business. in the second quarter of this year, alibaba recorded a total revenue of 243.236 billion yuan, a 4% increase over the same period last year.among them, the cloud intelligence group earned 26.549 billion yuan in revenue for alibaba, an increase of 6% compared with the same period last year.

the revenue growth of cloud intelligence group was mainly driven by the double-digit growth in revenue from public cloud products, including ai-related products, which was partially offset by the decline in non-public cloud revenue as alibaba gradually reduced lower-margin project-based contract revenue and focused on high-quality revenue.

however, in terms of its contribution to the company's total revenue, cloud intelligence group's performance in the second quarter of this year has declined compared with the same period last year. in the second quarter of last year, cloud intelligence group's revenue was second only to taotian group among alibaba's six major business groups, but in the second quarter of this year, its ranking fell to fourth, surpassing local life group and greater entertainment group, but was overtaken by alibaba cloud international digital business group and cainiao group.

the revenue growth rate of cloud intelligence group this quarter also lags behind that of other business groups of alibaba. in the second quarter of this year, the revenue of alibaba cloud international digital business group, cainiao group and local life group increased by 32%, 16% and 12% respectively, all ahead of the 6% revenue growth of cloud intelligence group.

while alibaba's revenue has achieved overall growth, its net profit indicator has not maintained the same growth trend. in the second quarter, alibaba recorded a net profit of 24.022 billion yuan, a decrease of 27% from the same period last year. this was mainly due to a decrease in operating profit and an increase in investment impairment, which was partially offset by changes in the market value of its equity investments.

in terms of adjusted ebita of each division, cloud intelligence group is currently the second largest of alibaba's six business groups after taotian group. in the second quarter of this year, cloud intelligence group's adjusted ebita was 2.337 billion yuan, an increase of 155% compared with 916 million yuan in the same period of 2023. this was mainly due to the company's focus on public cloud adoption, which led to improved product structure and improved operational efficiency, partially offset by increased investment in customers and technology.

in the second quarter, alibaba's net cash flow from operating activities was 33.636 billion yuan, down 26% from 45.306 billion yuan in the same period of 2023. alibaba's free cash flow (a non-gaap financial liquidity indicator) fell 56% year-on-year to 17.372 billion yuan.

in response, alibaba explained that "the year-on-year decline in free cash flow mainly reflects the increase in spending related to its investment in alibaba cloud infrastructure and other changes in working capital caused by factors such as our plan to reduce direct sales business."

in the second quarter report released this time, alibaba also announced some new progress made by alibaba cloud recently. for example, alibaba cloud has been clearly recognized as china's preferred cloud service provider for ai training and applications. according to gartner®'s recently released 2024 "magic quadranttm for data science and machine learning platforms" report, alibaba cloud is the only cloud service provider from asia mentioned among its global peers.

according to alibaba, the second-generation open-source model of tongyi qianwen has shown significant performance improvements in areas such as reasoning, code generation, and mathematics, while enhancing security features and expanding support to 27 languages. the number of paying users using alibaba cloud ai platform (bai lian) has increased by more than 200% month-on-month.

at the 2024 paris olympics that ended not long ago, alibaba cloud also made its presence felt. alibaba cloud's technology realized remote video production and transmission through cloud infrastructure, replacing satellites as the main transmission method for the first time in olympic history.

it is reported that two-thirds of the broadcasters of this olympic games used alibaba cloud to transmit the olympic live broadcast signals in real time around the world, covering billions of viewers. alibaba cloud also supported broadcasters to use more than 11,000 hours of video content produced by the olympic broadcasting service (obs). in addition, this is the first olympic games to use ai extensively, and alibaba cloud's ai technology is deployed in 14 olympic venues to achieve instantly generated 360-degree high-fidelity playback.

in fact, the reason why the previous failure of alibaba cloud had a wide impact is related to the huge business scale of alibaba cloud. at the 2023 yunqi conference held in the second half of last year, alibaba group chairman cai chongxin revealed that 80% of china's technology companies and half of the large model companies run on alibaba cloud.

cai chongxin also said, "since alibaba cloud computing wrote the first line of code in 2009, alibaba has hoped to make computing a public service like water and electricity, and to achieve more developers and enterprises. alibaba is the first large-scale internet company in the world to move all its businesses to the cloud."

according to the report "china's big data platform market share, 2023: the true arrival of the digital and intelligence integration era" recently released by international research organization idc, the scale of china's big data platform public cloud service market will reach 7.22 billion yuan in 2023, of which alibaba's market share will be as high as 40.2%, ranking first for four consecutive years. players following alibaba cloud include amazon web technology, huawei cloud, tencent cloud, etc.

idc said that alibaba cloud has obvious leading advantages in big data technology and industry practices: on the one hand, alibaba cloud is in sync with the world's leading level in the field of big data, and users can quickly introduce the most advanced big data capabilities by using alibaba cloud; on the other hand, it has rich experience in big data project construction in multiple fields such as the internet, retail, and finance, and can help users build a data foundation for digital transformation.

some analysts believe that with its huge business scale, deep technical accumulation and forward-looking strategic vision, alibaba cloud has played an irreplaceable role in promoting the development of china's and even the global cloud service industry. in a highly complex and evolving technology field, it is difficult for any company to completely avoid occasional failures and challenges, and alibaba cloud is no exception. however, the key lies in how to respond quickly, handle effectively and continuously improve. otherwise, repeated failures will only continue to erode user trust, causing some customers to doubt the reliability, stability and security of alibaba cloud, and eventually hand over opportunities to others.