Crypto exchange OKX suspended withdrawals temporarily after primary infrastructure provider Alibaba Cloud announced that they experienced a system failure. Aside from OKC, the failure also affected websites and apps at the Monetary Authority of Macau, Galaxy Macau hotel, Lotus TV Macau, and MFood delivery.

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Two Alibaba employees chat behind an Alibaba sign outside the company's office in Beijing on April 13, 2021.

Experiencing System Failure

Crypto users flocked to Twitter and complained about difficulties in withdrawing funds, and OKX responded that there was an intermittent connection error with their cloud provider.

Due to a system failure in the cloud computing unit of Alibaba Group Holding's "Alibaba Cloud," cryptocurrency withdrawals were suspended on the OKX exchange. Coin Telegraph reported that the server went offline on Saturday at 10:00 PM ET and failed to recover for over seven hours.

OKX said that Elastic Compute Service and other cloud products were affected due to an "equipment anomaly" at an Alibaba Cloud data center in Hong Kong, which offers three availability zones. All of these have been operating since 2014.

The company also clarified that funds are safe and there have been no losses despite some users claiming that their account balances have glitched to show $0 on their accounts. A confirmation from on-chain data revealed that OKX processed no transactions during this timeline.

Alibaba's Response

A spokesperson from Alibaba stated on a Sunday night that the issue is now resolved. However, no further details were provided by the company regarding the scope of the problem.

"We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused by the incident and our services are gradually back to normal. Our engineers worked hard with our data center partner's technicians to fix the issues, while additional resources have been put in place to help customers minimize the impact where possible," Alibaba stated.

Alibaba Cloud, also known as Aliyun is one of the largest infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider by revenue in Asia. The company is also the third largest worldwide since 2018. While they had the biggest IaaS market share in Hong Kong.

Other Affected Websites

Based on a report from South China Morning Post, other businesses and websites were also affected by this matter. This includes websites and apps operated by the Monetary Authority of Macau, Galaxy Macau hotel, Lotus TV Macau, and food delivery platform MFood.

While OKX updated the public in the evening that cloud services have resumed, some websites mentioned above were still inaccessible.

Also Read: Exchanging Words with OKX CEO Jay Hao on the Volatile Nature of the Crypto Industry

Alibaba's Future Plans

Alibaba Cloud announced that it will commit to upgrading its global partner ecosystem, as they invest $1 billion to expand its strategic move worldwide. The investments will consist of two incentives such as financial and non-financial.

As per the company, this will include funding, rebates, and go-to-market initiatives that will help their partners on enhancing and innovating their technologies.

Related Article: Alibaba Cloud to Improve Compliance After Failing to Report Log4j Vulnerability to the Chinese Government