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SCMP.COM

Tech / E-Commerce

Over 3 million WeChatmerchants hit by outages after ‘sabotage’ by service provider Weimob’s employee

· Part of major cloud-based marketing provider Weimob’s platformwas down after an employee attacked its production environment and database

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· Employee responsible was stressed over personal financial issuesand being stuck at home alone during coronavirus-related lockdowns, Weimob’sfounder says

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Published: 5:00am, 28Feb, 2020

Over 3 million merchants on Chinese super app WeChat werepotentially affected by service outages after a key operation and maintenanceemployee at major cloud-based marketing provider

Weimob [1] “deliberately sabotaged” the latter’s production environment and database.

Tencent-backed Weimob – one of the largestthird-party service providers for small and medium-sized businesses on WeChat –said in a Hong Kong stock exchange filing this week that the employeeapparently attacked its systems due to “personal mental and life issues”. Theemployee has since been arrested.

The Shanghai-based company said its monitoringsystem detected technical issues on Sunday night and worked with Tencent’scloud technical team on restoring its platform. By the next day Weimobidentified the employee responsible, who is now detained at the Baoshan PoliceStation in Shanghai, it said.

Founded in 2013, Hong Kong-listed Weimob has over 1,600 channelpartners and 3 million registered merchants. Among other services, its systemsupports

mini-programs [2], miniature apps within the WeChat platform, as well as public accounts and targeted marketing.

Earlier this year, WeChat owner Tencent announced [3]

that its users spent 800 billion yuan (US$115 billion)through its various mini-programs in 2019, a 160 per cent increase from theprevious year. Tencent declined to comment on the outages.

The outages hit merchants at a time when many in the country arealready

struggling due to disruptions to labour and logistics [4] linked to the deadly coronavirus outbreak.

“The five-day system failure may be beyondmany people's expectations, especially now that many stores have been closed duringthe epidemic and mainly rely on their online businesses,” said Dong Zhiyi, alawyer at Shanghai Joint-Win Law Firm and researcher at the China E-commerceResearch Center.

“So under the double blow, the impact is veryserious.”

In a subsequent statement on Thursday,Weimob’s founder and chief executive Sun Taoyong said that he was angry butfelt “sympathy” for the employee responsible after learning from the policethat the latter was mired in debt and had considered suicide, and wasdistressed over being stuck at home alone for 30 days due to the coronaviruslockdowns.

Sun said the employee had always performedwell and his colleagues saw him as dependable, so when they traced the attackback to him the company’s first suspicion was that his credentials could havebeen stolen.

“We survived the ‘natural disaster’ [of thecoronavirus outbreak] but unexpectedly a ‘human disaster’ put us in anextremely difficult situation,” Sun said.

Weimob said in the filing that it is workingon compensation plans for merchants who suffered losses due to the outages.

New users would have been able to use thecompany’s services as normal from Wednesday and existing users will have theirdata restored by midnight on Friday, it said, adding that it would provide atemporary transition plan for existing users before the system is fullyrestored.

For the first six months of 2019, Weimobreported a total revenue of 656.7 million yuan (US$93.7 million), of whichrevenue from its software-as-a-service (SaaS) business was 219.1 million yuan(US$31.2 million), or about 33.4 per cent.

The company’s board expects the outages causedby the employee’s actions to damage operations of its SaaS business, but notits other business segments, it said in the filing.