Alipay, China’s leading mobile payments platform, will bear the expense from unexpected losses that it incurred on Thursday, when a system error gave a 20 per cent discount to an undisclosed number of user transactions.
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The error, which was caused by a back-end misconfiguration in the app’s promotional campaign, applied an “immediate deduction” to the value of payment on certain user transactions made on that day, according to Alipay’s statement on Chinese microblogging service Weibo.
The statement was issued after many Alipay users posted screenshots on Chinese social media on Thursday to show that they were entitled to such a “government subsidy” on their transactions – including money transfers, credit card repayments and purchase of railway tickets – made at around 2.40pm on that day.
The Ant Group-operated payments platform did not specify the amount of losses that it suffered. Ant Group is the fintech affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the South China Morning Post.
Shanghai-based Alipay said it would bear the costs resulting from the system error, while assuring users who received discounts that it had no plans to recover any amount of money from them.
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That assurance was meant to address concerns about potential scams. Alipay pointed out that it had not sent any text messages to recover money and advised users not to click on links attached to any message they might receive regarding this matter.