Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings has blamed “irregularities” in the access to its clients’ cloud service hub for a breakdown last week, in a bid to soothe user concerns amid intensifying competition and rising demand in the domestic market.

In a detailed analysis published on Sunday, Tencent cited “irregularities in the cloud application programming interface (API)” as the reason behind disruptions in cloud computing services that affected at least 1,957 clients for around 87 minutes on April 8.

On that day, some users turned to social media platforms such as Weibo to report disruptions with text recognition, verification codes and other functions. Tencent’s cloud unit apologised on Weibo at the time and posted updates on its efforts to fix the issues.

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Errors in the API led to failures in the cloud clients’ control hub where users make purchases and changes to their services and resources, but they did not affect cloud services that were already running, Tencent said in the latest technical review of the incident, where it also vowed to implement improvements in its management.

Tencent’s elaborate explanation came as tech giants in China are facing a changing landscape for cloud computing services, which is seeing intensifying competition among major players and surging demand driven by artificial intelligence (AI) applications.

China’s cloud services market grew 16 per cent in 2023, compared with 10 per cent growth in 2022, according to a report by Canalys last month. Cloud infrastructure spending growth is expected to accelerate this year to 18 per cent driven by the surge in generative AI and steep price cuts implemented by Chinese service providers.

The cloud unit of Alibaba Group Holding, which owns the South China Morning Post, led the mainland China market with a 39 per cent share in the fourth quarter of 2023, followed by Huawei Technologies’ 19 per cent and Tencent’s 16 per cent, Canalys data showed.

Since last year, China’s cloud giants have lowered their offering prices amid fierce competition. Alibaba, which also experienced cloud service disruptions in 2023, and Tencent, both offered price reductions of as much as 50 per cent last May.