OKX, the tenth largest crypto exchange in the world by volume, has resumed trading “several hours” after the firm was hit by a hardware failure at Alibaba Cloud.
“There is currently an intermittent connection error with our cloud provider [Alibaba Cloud], which is affecting the user experience. Our dev team is resolving it with them. Funds are safe. Sorry for any inconvenience caused,” OKX first announced on its Twitter handle on Sunday at Hong Kong time 11:15 a.m.
Almost ten hours after the tweet, the firm said Alibaba Cloud had not restored all services yet.
Alibaba Cloud published a blog post on Sunday explaining that the firm found an equipment anomaly in “Zone C” of its data centre in Hong Kong. This, the company said, was caused by the failure of refrigeration equipment in an internet data centre operated by local telecoms firm PCCW. Cloud products related to database, storage, and network products, as well as the console access and API call operations, were affected.
The South China Morning Post reported that sites and apps operated by the Monetary Authority of Macau and Galaxy Macau hotel, Lotus TV Macaus were among those hit by the hardware failure.
As of Monday 2:56 a.m. Hong Kong time, OKX announced that trading services have resumed. Meanwhile, Alibaba Cloud added in another update in the same blogpost that customers who have been affected by this anomaly will be compensated based on service agreements with the company.
Alibaba was the third-largest cloud service provider in the world in 2021, with a 9.5% market share, according to data published by Gartner. In September, the firm pledged to invest $1 billion via “financial and non-financial means such as funding, rebates and go-to-initiatives” to help its customers accelerate tech innovation and market expansion over the next three years, according to a company release.