Server crashes at collaborative office platforms in China as too many people work from home

(Photo from WeChat Work.)

China's two main collaborative office platforms, WeChat Work (企业微信) and Alibaba's DingTalk (钉钉), today both suffered server crashes due to excessive user numbers.

Affected by the new coronavirus epidemic, the Spring Festival holidays in many parts of the country have been postponed to February 2. This means that today is the first day of work.

In order to ensure the safety of employees, many companies have adopted the method of working from home. It may be that there are too many people using it, and a large number of users have reported that both WeChat Work and DingTalk have experienced server crashes.

In response to this, DingTalk said that at 9 am this morning, a large number of companies and organizations will have their morning meeting in full swing, and instantly launched a large number of live broadcasts of various meetings at the same time.

"We are backed by emergency deployment and have now resumed," DingTalk said.

WeChat Work said that the number of visits of its meeting functions had soared this morning and there was a temporary flow restriction. The team has done an emergency repair and expanded capacity guarantees, and this feature has now been restored.

Under the new coronavirus epidemic, China is seing the world's largest work from home test.

According to announcements issued by Tencent and Alibaba, their workers will work from home on February 3-7, and they are tentatively scheduled to return to work on February 10.

Baidu also said that due to the impact of the epidemic, the company decided to extend the Spring Festival holiday time for Chinese employees and arrange employees to work from home.

"It's a good opportunity for us to test working from home at scale," said Alvin Foo, managing director of Reprise Digital, a Shanghai ad agency with 400 people that's part of Interpublic Group. "Obviously, not easy for a creative ad agency that brainstorms a lot in person." It's going to mean a lot of video chats and phone calls, he said to Bloomberg.

The cohorts working from home are about to grow into armies. At the moment, most people in China are still on vacation for the Lunar New Year. But as Chinese companies begin to restart operations, it's likely to usher in the world's largest work-from-home experiment.