China's top Office clone copies Microsoft again – with an inconvenient outage

China's top personal productivity suite, WPS Office, experienced a lengthy outage yesterday – during working hours.

In a post to China's X-like social media service Weibo, WPS Office developer Kingsoft acknowledged the outage, apologized, and told users that "emergency repairs by engineers" had resolved the issue.

Like Microsoft's 365 suite, WPS Office blends desktop apps with online services – an arrangement it promotes as "Your Uninterrupted Workspace, Always Secure and Reliable."

Yeah, about that …

The outage commenced mid-morning and persisted until around 3:00 PM local time, sparking a predictable outpouring of grumpiness on social media as users were unable to access documents stored in Kingsoft's cloud.

Another fun fact about the outage is that it came the day after Kingsoft announced its quarterly results, which saw the biz produce 13 percent year-on-year revenue growth – plenty from AI services – and 11.5 percent profit improvement.

Kingsoft has offered users 15 days of free service by way of apology.

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WPS Office is compatible with Microsoft's productivity tools, and is available on Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and iOS. Downloads of the suite can be found here.

If you run it, be prepared to find the software very familiar. We'll be kind and say that's because Kingsoft is inspired by Microsoft's products – to the point of emulating their best features.

In this case, Kingsoft has also emulated Microsoft's nasty habit of experiencing outages at inconvenient moments.

Kingsoft and WPS Office dominate China's personal productivity market, boasting a presence on 602 million devices as of June 2024. That position of strength seems capable of being sustained even if China moves away from Windows and imported hardware – WPS Office has already been ported to local chipmaker Loongson's RISC-V-like processor architecture.

The suite has plenty of users outside China too – probably because it's available at no cost for a "Basic edition" that offers limited functionality and just 1GB of cloud storage. Other editions start at $4.91/month.

The developer has faced controversy over matters such as allegedly assisting state censorship by deleting customer documents from its cloud – an allegation it batted away as exercising its terms and conditions by removing links to offending documents. In late 2023, Kingsoft also apologized after admitting it used customers' docs to feed its AI training efforts. ®