As of 1am today, Alibaba Cloud said fire fighting efforts were ongoing but caused water to accumulate in the server room, posing a risk of electrical short circuits. — Image by rawpixel.com on Freepik
PETALING JAYA: A lithium battery explosion at a Singapore data centre on the morning of Sept 10 caused a fire, resulting in “network access anomalies” for Alibaba Cloud and disrupting services it hosts, including those in Malaysia.
W.Media, a tech publisher on cloud and data centres, reported that the disruption affected Lazada and Bytedance. It claimed that internal teams and sellers using these platforms experienced various issues.
Lazada posted on its seller centre that it’s currently experiencing a temporary system issue affecting some features in the Seller Center, including the chatbot, order processing via the Order Management page, handover to its shopping providers, access to real-time performance data in Sponsored Solutions, and potential delays in the Sponsored Affiliate settlements.
It said it is working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible, adding that it will arrange SLA (for estimated shipping time) extensions for order processing between Sept 8 and Sept 13 by five business days.
On X (formerly Twitter), users reported difficulties uploading new content and hosting live video sessions on TikTok. Some encountered system error messages on the order page, and screenshots of emails purportedly from TikTokShop Creator indicated that the platform was aware of the technical issues but didn’t provide a recovery time.
Dododots founder Esther Erin, who relies on TikTok Shop to promote and sell products, said that she was impacted by the issue yesterday.
"Yes, we couldn’t run new ads, post videos or access the seller centre. So basically, everything that we use on TikTok wasn't functioning," she said, adding that an official update stated that it was an app-wide issue.
She is no longer facing any issues today.
However, a user with the handle @Farahannisha posted on X today: "Is TikTok down again? Trying to upload a video, but my tasks are piling up. What’s going on with the Singapore server? So tired of searching for answers everywhere!"
When contacted, TikTok Malaysia declined to comment. LifestyleTech has reached out to Lazada.
As of 1am today, Alibaba Cloud said firefighting efforts were ongoing but caused water to accumulate in the server room, posing a risk of electrical short circuits.
"An emergency power shutdown has been implemented for one of the server buildings in Singapore Availability Zone C, while network services for other buildings in Availability Zone C have been gradually restored," it said in the latest update on its cloud monitoring site.
Alibaba Cloud first announced that it detected network access anomalies in Availability Zone C of the Singapore region on Sept 10, saying that it will cause "some cloud services to function abnormally".
In a later update on the same day, Alibaba Cloud said that firefighters had arrived on the site to handle the situation.
At 8pm yesterday, it said that the fire alarm had not been completely eliminated due to fire safety control.
"Currently, some network equipment in the data centre has experienced abnormalities in high-temperature environments, affecting the network connectivity of some cloud products.
"If the subsequent temperature rise is not effectively controlled, the possibility of a complete network outage in Availability Zone C of Singapore will increase," Alibaba Cloud said.
According to a report in Channel News Asia (CNA), Alibaba Cloud has three availability zones in Singapore, which are separate, isolated data centres within the cloud provider's infrastructure.
It reported that a fire broke out at a data centre operated by Digital Realty in Loyang. Digital Realty is a real estate firm that owns and operates three data centres in Singapore.
It was also reported that an unmanned firefighting robot had been deployed to cool down batteries involved in the fire at 9pm yesterday. The Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) told CNA: “This will likely be a prolonged operation.”
