Entering ChinaOn the afternoon of January 16th, many netizens reported on social media that Alipay had a bug, offering a 20% discount on all orders, including personal transfers, ticket purchases, credit card repayments, and rent payments.
Alipay issued a statement early this morning: Due to a mistake on our part yesterday afternoon, a small number of users enjoyed an immediate discount when making payments. We understand that you are concerned about whether we will recover the discount. Here are a few facts to clarify:
The official Alipay has not sent any text messages about recovering funds. If you receive the text message shown in the picture below, do not click on it to avoid being deceived. Please also help spread the word to each other.
How did the mistake occur? Actually, we made a mistake in the back-end of a regular marketing campaign on Alipay. We wrongly configured the marketing template, getting both the discount amount and the type of discount wrong.
Since it is our fault, the cost and responsibility must be borne by us. Regarding the marketing discount funds that have already been issued, Alipay will not pursue payment from users. Please rest assured.
As previously reported:
According to the screenshots posted by netizens, when they paid through Alipay between 14:40 and 14:45 p.m., they were prompted to “government subsidies” and reduced the discount by 20%.
Ant Group confirmed this to Economic Observer. When reporters asked about the exact time period of the above “government subsidy bug” in the Alipay platform system, the scope of the affected area and the overall scale of the order amount involved, the official did not respond.
The netizens who experienced the above bug problem of Alipay yesterday afternoon believe that this is the first P0 accident of Alipay in 2025. It is reported that in the Internet enterprise, P0 represents the highest level of accident, core business important functions are unavailable, and the impact is wide.
In 2017, Alipay also had a P0 accident, some netizens broke the news that “Alipay has a new loophole, strangers have the opportunity to log in to your Alipay, and acquaintances have 100% chance to log in to your Alipay.”
At that time, Ant Financial responded that it had made improvements. The safety level of the risk control system is improved. At present, the user can only retrieve the login password by identifying recent purchases and identifying his friends on his own phone. This method cannot be applied to retrieve the login password through other mobile devices.
