The reputation of Tecent’s cloud computing service Tencent Cloud has taken a serious knock on Monday. A Tencent Cloud user under the name of “前沿数据 (qianyan shuju, literally ‘cutting edge data’)” claims an indemnity of RMB 11,016,000 ($1.6 million) for metadata damage to files hosted by Tencent Cloud due to bugs in the firmware.
After informing the user as soon as they spotted the problem, Tencent Cloud sought help from a group of tech experts to restore the data, but they failed to fully recover the files, according to an official announcement from the company. Unfortunately, the user doesn’t have backup on other platforms.
The cloud computing firm has vowed to compensate the user a total of RMB 136,469 for settlement of the case, around 37 times of the user’s payment for service on Tencent Cloud. While compensation will be welcome, it falls short of the user’s expectations.
“Due to the errors occurred on Tencent Cloud platform, our data worth of tens of million RMB was lost on July 20, including user profile data and various contents we have accumulated over a long period of time. This is a disaster for a startup,” Beijing Qingbo Data Control Technology, the startup behind the account, said in an announcement.
Tencent Cloud has been in hot water over the past month. The current data loss case comes after a system collapse in late July, which caused system failure in parts of its cloud in Guangzhou.
Chinese cloud computing industry has been gaining momentum over the past few years. The country’s public cloud is expected to worth RMB 34 billion by 2018, data from ASKIC Consulting shows. AliCloud (45.5%), Tencent Cloud (10.3%), China Telecom(7.6%), Kingsoft (6.5%) and AWS (5.4%) took the top five spots in China’s public cloud industry in 2017, according to report by IDC.