Inhibited by having to stay at home to avoid the epidemic, operators attacked backwards and brought down the WeChat system

More than 3 million merchants on China’s super-app WeChat have been affected by service outages after an important operation and maintenance staff of Weimod, which provides platform-based marketing campaigns. Large cloud computing for WeChat – intentionally sabotaging systems and databases.

Weimob is backed by Tencent, which is one of the largest third-party service providers for small and medium businesses on WeChat. The representative said the employee appeared to have attacked his company’s systems, due to mental and personal problems.

Shanghai-based Weimod said its monitoring system uncovered technical issues on Sunday night and worked with Tencent’s cloud engineering team to restore their platform. . The next day, the company identified the responsible employee, who is currently being held at Baoshan Police Station in Shanghai.

Coronavirus makes e-commerce services in China boom.

Founded in 2013, Weimob has more than 1,600 channel partners and 3 million registered merchants. The incident occurred at a time when Chinese merchants were struggling to counter the effects of the new coronavirus disease, related to production and logistics. The incident, which lasted up to 5 days, has severely affected stores and their businesses.

Earlier this year, Tencent said users on WeChat spent $ 115 billion through various small programs in 2019, up 160% from the previous year. However, the company also declined to comment on the incident.

In a statement released on February 27, Weimob founder and CEO, Sun Taoyong, said he was “very angry but felt very sympathetic to the responsible staff”. He was later told by police that the man had been bogged down in debt and attempted suicide, due to being trapped at home for 30 days, due to the coronavirus epidemic.

Sun said the employee always has a good working attitude and colleagues say he is trustworthy. So when the incident was discovered, the company’s first suspicion was that his credentials might have been stolen.

“We survived the ‘natural disaster’ (referring to the coronavirus outbreak) but did not expect a ‘human disaster’ that put us in an extremely difficult situation,” said Sun. .

Weimob representatives said they are preparing compensation plans for traders damaged by the incident.

In the first 6 months of 2019, Weimob reported a total revenue of USD 93.7 million, of which its revenue from software service business was USD 31.2 million, accounting for about 33.4%.

The company’s board of directors hopes the incident will only cause damage to software service business, not other businesses.

Refer to SCMP