What's Going On With Alibaba Stock Tuesday?

Alibaba Group Holding Limited BABA stock is trading lower Tuesday amid reports of its cloud unit's second outage in a month.

On Monday, the Chinese e-commerce giant's cloud service suffered a nearly two-hour-long disruption affecting customers in mainland China, Hong Kong, and the U.S.

Several of Alibaba Cloud's database management products, including PostgreSQL, Redis, and MySQL editions, faced disruptions in regions including Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Virginia, U.S. 

On November 27, 2023, the cloud unit detected abnormalities in the console and OpenAPI access for these database products at 09:16 Beijing time and resolved by 10:58 the same day, Reuters reports. 

Alibaba, holding 29.9% of China's cloud market share in the first half of 2023, faced a similar disruption on November 12. 

This earlier outage impacted cloud-based database management systems and cloud communication systems across East Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and North America, causing flagship applications like Taobao and DingTalk to crash briefly, as per the report.

Tech industry experts have raised concerns about the reliability of Alibaba Cloud's services following these incidents. 

Alibaba recently halted plans to spin off its cloud business due to uncertainties from U.S. export controls on AI-related chips. 

Also this week, Alibaba closed its quantum computing research lab, part of the DAMO Academy, indicating a shift towards cost-cutting measures.

The stock has lost 16.1% YTD.

Price Action: BABA shares traded lower by 1.0% at $76.75 premarket on the last check Tuesday.