On Dec. 25, Alibaba Cloud issued a statement to explain a prolonged breakdown of cloud services in the Hong Kong region that occurred on Dec. 18. The firm said the incident was the longest large-scale outage in more than a decade of operation, affecting multiple government and media websites including the Monetary Authority of Macao, takeaway platform mFood, and cryptocurrency exchange OKX, which had to suspend withdrawals. The statement said the incident was caused by a cooling equipment failure at an Alibaba data center. The Chinese tech giant’s cloud unit said it will strengthen the management of its data center infrastructure providers, adding that it will compensate all affected customers as soon as possible. [Alibaba Cloud]