A Former Tencent Cloud Employee Speaks ‘Fairly’ for Tencent Cloud: The Polarization Between 7-Cent Debt Collection and Product Collapse

Preface

I recently came across the article “7 Cents Drove the First-Generation Internet Moguls Crazy,” which reminded me of the six months I spent at Tencent Cloud. Honestly, as a former employee who only worked there for half a year, my feelings are complicated. Some call me a Tencent hater, others call me a Tencent shill. Today, I’m neither — I just want to talk about the two drastically different sides of Tencent Cloud that I saw as a half-insider for half a year.

How should I put it — it’s like hiring a housekeeper who carefully prepares breakfast for you every morning (7-cent debt collection), then turns around and burns your house down (data loss). 😂

Let’s Talk About Debt Collection First: This Service Rivals Haidilao

First, I have to speak fairly for Tencent Cloud — when it comes to overdue payment collection, they truly put in the effort.

│ 📝Notes: The “fair words” here are limited strictly to the “debt collection” scenario.

My Tencent Cloud account only hosts my personal blog, using just DNS and CDN, but I still occasionally receive their “gentle reminders.” 7 cents? True story! If you owe them 7 cents, they’ll remind you via email, SMS, and even phone calls, over and over: “Dear customer, your account balance is running low~”. So now I use Tencent Cloud with anxiety — the moment I see an email, I rush to purchase new resource packages and top up my balance…

Their service attitude is better than Tony the hairdresser downstairs. Tony only pushes me to sign up for membership cards; Tencent Cloud pushes me to renew, again and again, as patient as your mom waking you up in the morning.

By comparison, OCI overseas just sends one email, then directly “stops service upon expiration” without a peep. By that logic, 7 cents? If you miss that one email, you’re done. Purely from the experience and cost perspective, it’s hard to say Tencent Cloud did anything wrong. They truly nailed this “service” to perfection.

But is that enough?

Technology: When You Think “Good Service” Can Cover Everything Up

As an architect, I know full well what the core of cloud services is. It’s not the debt collector’s smile, not the sales pitch, and certainly not the so-called “ecosystem.” It’s stability, reliability, and technical capability.

And these are precisely where Tencent Cloud frustrated me the most. 🤦‍♂️

1. SDK Took Down GitHub

Many people probably still remember this one. In 2020 (I can’t recall the exact date, but this definitely happened), a Tencent Cloud SDK update directly caused GitHub tags to fail to load.

You read that right. GitHub, the world’s largest code hosting platform, was brought down by a Tencent Cloud SDK. 😱

│ 📝Disclaimer: I’m not being alarmist. This was indeed a public, widely reported incident. The root cause was dependency chaos or misconfiguration that triggered a chain reaction.

When this happened, what were enterprise customers who chose Tencent Cloud supposed to think? “If your own SDK has pitfalls this big, will my business get taken down by you someday too?”

The SDK had other issues as well, such as being extremely bloated.

Isn’t this a classic case of engineering culture failure? A major cloud platform that can’t even manage its own published SDKs — how can it talk about providing stable, reliable services to users? It’s like a doctor who can’t even sterilize their own scalpel but wants to perform heart bypass surgery on you — would you dare?

2. Data Loss: Every Tech Professional’s Nightmare

What’s scarier than the SDK issue? Data loss.

I’ve seen it in the news more than once, or heard people venting in group chats: “Tencent Cloud lost data again.”
Which incidents specifically? I remember one where a physical disk firmware bug caused the startup “Frontline CNC” to lose nearly ten million yuan worth of data entirely. The officially claimed “three-replica” backup mechanism also failed simultaneously, sparking widespread doubt about cloud data security. Users’ data was just gone. And there were others — far too many.

For any enterprise, data is life. No matter how cheap or convenient your cloud platform is, if it keeps losing data, you’re a ticking time bomb. When I was doing architecture at an insurance company, I repeatedly emphasized to my team: for the financial industry, data loss is an absolute red line. You can be slow, you can be expensive, but you absolutely cannot lose data (well, slow and expensive aren’t acceptable either, haha).

Tencent Cloud’s performance in this regard, frankly, disappointed me. As a former insider, I could feel the immense pressure they were under to “reduce costs and increase efficiency,” but transmitting that pressure to operational stability is digging their own grave.

👍️Pros: Meticulous debt collection, great service attitude (limited to the overdue payment scenario).
👎Cons: Poor technical stability, high risk of data loss, security management loopholes.

Product: Free Bait, Paid Harvest

Beyond technology, Tencent Cloud’s product strategy also deeply confused me. Many people came for the freebies — like TCB (serverless cloud functions), Coding (code hosting and CI/CD platform). They offered free tiers at first, everyone used them happily, and developers thought Tencent Cloud was fantastic.

Then what?