NetEase Games Crash, Insider Says: "Server Room Network Failure"

SUMMARY:

This outage lasted over 2 hours.

Phoenix News Technology

August 5th, morning, NetEase's games such as "Master of the Mystic Force", "The Fifth Person", "Seven Days World", and "One Dream Jianghu" etc. suddenly experienced login exceptions, with the hashtag "#NetEase Games Crashed" trending on Weibo. Many players reported that the game interface was stuck at the login stage, and attempts to restart, switch networks, or reinstall were ineffective.

One user even joked, "I re-downloaded three times without suspecting NetEase", while another thought it was their own internet issue.

An insider at NetEase told Phoenix News Technology that the internal office system POPO also experienced some issues, allowing users to send and receive messages but with some business functions unavailable. This analyst believes that this outage is likely due to a server room network failure at NetEase. NetEase has since released an official announcement confirming this assessment.

NetEase's last major outage occurred in March 2025, when it was found that the issue was caused by China Mobile's network fault.

Another insider at NetEase revealed to Phoenix News Technology that since 2022, NetEase has been building a self-owned data center in Guizhou Province. This project is estimated to have cost millions of dollars and will eventually host core business functions such as meta-universe, cloud music, intelligent learning, e-commerce, media, and gaming for over 1 billion users across the country.

In Q2 2024, NetEase Cloud Music completed its relocation to this new data center, but just shortly after, it experienced a server failure that lasted over 2 hours.

This outage also lasted over 2 hours, with an insider saying that "the main issue was the scale of the outage, which made troubleshooting extremely difficult".