China: Outage of Microsoft Office Alternative

According to South China Morning Post, WPS Office, a suit of cloud-based office software sold by Chinese developer Kingsoft as an alternative to Microsoft Office, was down for hours on Wednesday, disrupting the operations of companies nationwide.

Social media reports of the outage began surfacing in the morning, as users took to the internet to complain about difficulties opening, syncing and uploading WPS documents. Others said they experienced network latency when working on files. The topic #WPSCollapse became the fifth trending term on microblogging site Weibo.

At 3.33pm, Kingsoft announced on its Weibo account that WPS service had “resumed after emergency repairs by engineers”, without elaborating on the scope and reason for the breakdown. To placate users, the company is offering everyone a free 15-day membership, to be claimed on Thursday.

The outage is the second one in China this week that involved a major online service. On Monday, NetEase Cloud Music, a music-streaming platform run by video gaming giant NetEase, experienced a widespread service failure that lasted over two hours. In the aftermath, the company gave users a free seven-day subscription.

WPS Office claims a more than 90% in mainland China’s market for mobile terminals. It is widely used in key sectors such as government departments, financial institutions and telecommunications network operators.

As of June, WPS had 271 million monthly active users (MAUs) on desktop and 328 million MAUs on smartphones, according to Kingsoft’s financial disclosure.

For general users on the mainland, WPS has long been seen as a cheaper alternative to Microsoft Office, although the commercial launch of the first WPS word processor in 1989 predated Microsoft’s set-up of a China office in 1992.

Today, the WPS website still markets its products as being “highly compatible” with Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

However, WPS has previously been accused of censoring private user documents. In 2022, a Chinese novelist said WPS locked her out of her own work, with the software warning her that “the file may contain sensitive content”.

At the time, WPS said it “never censors, locks or deletes users’ local files”, but added that it “is obliged to review all content distributed through its platform” in accordance with Chinese laws.