The world’s biggest online population is staying home and China’s internet can’t cope

People in part of the world’s biggest internet population have been trying to carry on with their daily lives from the confines of their own homes because of the coronavirus outbreak in China. But now they have to contend with a new inconvenience: The occasional server crash.

On Sunday night, customers of one of the country’s most popular streaming services found their favorite shows go black all of a sudden. The surprise outage drove many viewers, stuck at home with little else to do, to grumble online with the Weibo hashtag #iQiyiCollapses. Baidu’s iQiyi counts over 100 million subscribers in China -- more than the number of subscribers Netflix has either inside or outside of North America.

“I was watching the finale of [Taiwanese romance show] Someday or One Day and crying like a baby, and then iQiyi crashed,” wrote one Weibo user.

The platform said it fixed the issue shortly after 11pm, citing “technical problems.” Then just a few hours later, when people woke up Monday morning, viewers found another online service had crashed -- this time an educational app called Xuexitong. Some punctual students regretted showing up on time.

“If only I knew, I wouldn’t have woken up early,” whined one student.

As schools across the nation close down to curb the spread of Covid-19, teachers and students are embracing online classes (including virtual PE lessons). When the spring semester kicked off last week, more than a million students and parents tuned in from Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, state-run media Xinhua reported. Xuexitong said at 8am on Monday, more than 12 million users logged onto its platform all at the same time, overwhelming its servers. The service has since returned.