Alipay's Huabei Service Crashes, Leaving Millions Unable to Access Bills

Alipay’s buy-now-pay-later service Huabei went dark Tuesday night, triggering an avalanche of complaints on social media and sending the phrase “Huabei is down” straight to the top of Weibo’s trending chart.

Users trying to make their monthly Huabei repayments were met with a blank billing page starting around 11 PM Beijing time. Instead of their outstanding balance, the service displayed a vague message: “Under institutional maintenance, bills cannot be viewed temporarily.”

Alipay’s customer service team acknowledged the outage on social media, confirming they had received reports and were “urgently handling” the situation. Affected users were told to retry later, with the company apologizing for the inconvenience.

As of Tuesday night, Ant Group — Alipay’s parent company — had not issued an official statement on the cause of the outage or an estimated recovery timeline.

Huabei, which functions as a built-in credit and BNPL service within Alipay, is one of Ant Group’s most widely used financial products. The timing of the crash — during a standard repayment window — could create complications for users facing due dates, though Ant Group has not indicated whether late fees will be waived for those affected by the outage.