14 DAY TRIAL // The top office services in China went down on Monday due to a huge spike in usage caused by a record number of employees working from home.
The majority of businesses in China were told by local authorities to avoid reopening their offices until at least February 10 in an attempt to prevent the coronavirus from spreading after the infection already killed hundreds.
The spike in usage, however, eventually proved overwhelming for the country’s top office services, which crashed or experienced massive slowdowns when employees connected on early Monday, according to a report from AbacusNews.
Alibaba’s DingTalk and Tencent’s WeChat Work both experienced disruptions, with both companies restoring full access to the services a few hours after the issues were first reported. Tencent said it also expanded capacity to be able to handle the increased usage, the company was quoted as saying by the cited source.
Huawei’s WeLink and ByteDance’s Lark encountered similar problems on Monday, the report adds.
Record number of remote employees
While specifics on how many users connected to office apps on Monday to work from home, one report cites Alibaba as saying that DingTalk reached 200 million active users during the day.
The cited source claims that around 24 of the country’s 31 provinces required companies to avoid reopening before February 10. Previously, Chinese authorities decided to extend the Spring Festival break by three days in an attempt to prevent the coronavirus from spreading.
Companies offering office apps that allow employees to work remotely have also released special updates for the products, including an increase of the maximum number of participants in a video conference, as the number of users working from home was expected to increase. Additional services like online training and telemedicine were offered to specific organizations, including schools.