Bilibili went down at prime time; its 'sorry' premium gift then auto-charged users

At around 10:50 pm on 13 July 2021, Bilibili — China's biggest video platform for Gen Z — went dark worldwide on both the app and the website, at the peak hour for night-time entertainment. Users met 404 errors, and 'bilibili is down' shot to the number-one trending slot on Weibo. Speculation that the company's Shanghai headquarters was on fire grew so loud that the Shanghai fire department issued an overnight notice confirming there was no fire.

Shortly before 2 am the company apologised on Weibo, saying that failures in 'some server rooms' had made the service inaccessible and that teams were restoring it gradually; service was back in the early hours. The company gave no technical detail on why multiple server rooms had failed together, and the apology was all it published.

As a goodwill gesture Bilibili gave every user a day of premium membership — and turned the apology into a second incident. Users who had once held a recurring plan found the gift silently re-triggered the auto-renewal they had cancelled, charging real money. The company acknowledged the bug, said it 'triggered an existing auto-deduction function', promised full refunds to anyone wrongly charged and told users to cancel the renewal themselves.

App and site dark worldwide from late evening into the early morning; a day of premium membership given to all users, plus refunds after an auto-renewal bug

The official apology blamed 'some server rooms' — plural — failing together, which points to shared dependencies rather than isolated hardware breaking.

Crisis communication was limited to late-night Weibo posts, so the headquarters-fire rumour ran for hours until the fire department publicly knocked it down.

The compensation gift reused an old subscription flow with a built-in trap: anyone who had ever held a recurring plan could be silently re-enrolled and charged.

A platform whose product is prime-time uptime needs failure isolation across its server rooms; and a compensation 'gift' is a product change that deserves testing like any release.

The outage itself faded quickly and Bilibili stayed China's leading Gen Z video platform, but the auto-renewal bug kept the story trending for another two days while the company processed refunds. The episode became a textbook Chinese internet example of an outage compounding itself through a badly tested goodwill gesture: the fix for the first mistake shipped with a second, avoidable mistake attached.