Kingsoft Office suffers service outage in China

Kingsoft Office's service, the STAR-listed company's work document processing tool, reported wide-range "service collapses" in China on Wednesday morning, affecting millions of users during working hours.

The service was gradually restored by afternoon. The company promised to offer 15-day free membership service to compensate all users, it said without mentioning the reasons for the disruption.

Kingsoft Office's WPS service, regarded as the equivalent of Microsoft Office in China, is used to deal with documents in text, charter and presentation files. WPS now serves more than 600 million monthly active devices globally.

On Wednesday morning, many people were unable to access online WPS files, and they "tried thousands of times to open working files" and "wasted time the whole morning", netizens complained on the X-like Weibo platform.

By 3pm, Kingsoft had fully restored the service and promised to offer the 15-day free VIP services for all users to claim on Wednesday. Some netizen agreed to "forgive" the disruption because of the compensation, they said on Weibo.

It's not the first time that big tech companies have suffered widespread outage recently. Alibaba's cloud service and NetEase's streaming music service had similar issues.

NetEase Cloud Music, with more than 200 million monthly active users, reported widespread outage for over two hours on Monday afternoon, blaming infrastructure issues. The service was fully restored in the evening.

As compensation, NetEase offered users a free seven-day membership to be claimed on Monday.

Shares of STAR-listed Kingsoft closed at 188.7 yuan (US$26.6), down 1.28 percent, on Wednesday, compared with the 0.27 percent decline in the STAR 50 Index.

In the first half, Kingsoft Office revenue reached 2.41 billion yuan, growing 11.1 percent from a year ago. Its net profit growth hit 20.4 percent to 721 million yuan.