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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.
WPS Office claims a more than 90 per cent share 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.
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