Tencent Video said functions were being restored gradually and apologised for the outage. Tencent did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday on the current status of the service.
Tencent Video is engaged in fierce rivalry with other top video streaming sites in China, including Baidu’s iQiyi and Alibaba’s Youku, with the industry facing a new competitive threat from the rise of short video sites.
Tencent’s video streaming service had 117 million subscribers in the third quarter, down 2 per cent year-on-year, and it charges subscription fees for premium content starting at 30 yuan (US$4.21) each month.
Tencent takes comfort from its huge stockpile of Nvidia chips for AI initiatives
Tencent takes comfort from its huge stockpile of Nvidia chips for AI initiatives
The disruptions to Tencent Video come hot on the heels of major outages at Alibaba’s cloud computing unit and the country’s biggest ride-hailing service Didi.
The ride-hailing app operator, which handles about 30 million orders per day, said in a statement that the breakdown was caused by an “underlying system software failure” and not external attacks.
Alibaba Cloud’s second outage last month – affecting customers in mainland China, Hong Kong and the United States – came just weeks after a service failure hit its Singles’ Day shopping festival. It affected some of Alibaba’s most popular apps, including workplace communications tool DingTalk and second-hand goods trading platform Xianyu, as well as online marketplace Taobao. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
Tencent’s super-app WeChat, an essential tool for messaging, payments and various services with 1.34 billion monthly active users, also experienced a breakdown in March this year caused by a failure of “supporting facilities”. China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology later summoned the company for an explanation of the incident and necessary rectification measures.
Separately, Tencent has continued to consolidate its businesses with a plan to shut down Moo, a small music streaming service. The five-year-old app will cease operations on December 31, ending new registrations next Friday.
Moo was launched in 2018 to target the younger generation with niche music offerings and as a supplement to Tencent’s three main music apps – Kugou, Kuwo and QQ Music.