Is Alipay still worthy of trust?

On May 27th, Alipay encountered a breakdown, resulting in many failure cases of logging on in such applications as Alipay Wallet and Alibaba’s Yuebao. As online shopping has become an indispensable part of daily life, it worries people to see the happening of such kind of breakdown.

After over 2 hours since the breakdown, insiders expressed the opinion that traditional financial institutions have little possibility to encounter such nationwide security problem, and 2 hours of large-scale breakdown is serious security accident, which may possibly be reported for record to the State Council.

Alipay has adopted the mechanism of “availability in separate places”, namely providing services in the machine rooms of both Hangzhou and other places where the system would distribute customer demands of the whole country to the machines rooms in different places. Although the mechanism has functioned in this accident, the result is far from what Alipay has promised along the way. Cheng Li, chief technology officer of Alipay, once expressed his opinion that Alipay’s “ideal aim is to make its users unconscious of running failures of its applications”.

True as it is that Alipay is responsible for doing better, it is still not necessary to escalate the breakdown to such conclusions as “Alipay is insecure” or “Traditional industry is more secure”.

At first, Alipay was invented for resolving trust issue of online shopping, therefore growing up to prosperity in China where E-commerce was not widespread at that time. Since the entry of Alipay into daily payment, transference, and other financial areas, it has brought about better experience in shopping, transference and financial transaction. Meanwhile, it has instilled brand-new vitality into a field which has long been highly monopolized traditionally by state-owned enterprises, therefore deeply affecting the development of China’s economy.

However, challenges are co-existent with opportunities. Compared with traditional financial industry, Alipay’s advantages originate from its dependence on Internet. Actually, the Internet times is a typical era of risky society. All such things as high tech, high accuracy and high institutionalized technology and economic structure render risks ubiquitous.

Google, Apple and Wechat have all encountered similar risks. The first one, despite its technology advantages, once came across a series of breakdowns where accounts can not be synchronized and online cloud storage service, i.e. Google Drive can not run. The second one’s mobile payment system, i.e. Apple Pay, once had the breakdown of replicate money collection. The third one had an online payment breakdown in calling a taxi due to the launch of Tenpay Financier. However, as long as the risks are controllable without bringing about losses, they are acceptable.

As a matter of fact, in the Internet daily life experience, security is only one of the factors that people care about. Alipay’s high efficiency and friendly user experience can never be replaced by traditional industry. The development of China’s “Internet+” and the Internet reform in financial industry shall not be affected by the breakdown of this time.

Published on The Paper | 2015-5-29