Alibaba fires 4 employees for hacking system and hoarding mooncakes

It's the Mid-Autumn Festival and people are taking their mooncakes really, really seriously.

Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba said it fired four employees on Tuesday who were found hacking into the company's internal mooncake ordering system. They were trying to get extra boxes for themselves.

SEE ALSO: Mid-Autumn Festival in Asia kicks off with dragons, lanterns and mooncakes

Every year, Alibaba prepares a limited edition set of mooncakes for its employees. Each person gets a box for free, and this year the company decided to sell the extra stock internally for people who want to give away sets to friends and family.

Naturally, the tech firm got its IT folks to write up an ordering system for the sale.

These are the mooncakes. Credit: weibo Credit: weibo

But ironically, four people working for its cyber security department manipulated the ordering system to grab 124 boxes for themselves, it said.

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According to an anonymous forum user claiming to be one of the four, he made a plug-in for the ordering system to place orders on the overloaded site, after he failed to get in manually. The plug-in ended up successfully ordering 16 boxes, before he realised what had happened.

Alibaba moved quickly and fired him just two hours later, he claims.

The company said the firing was necessary because it was an issue of integrity.

But debate has been raging on Weibo for the past day since news broke of their firing. While many applauded Alibaba for maintaining a "high standard integrity", some said the punishment was harsher than necessary.

Some netizens also called for harsher punishment on the managers and technical staff who made the ordering system.

Alibaba's payment spinoff, Ant Financial Services, also has a special edition mooncake set for its employees. The company runs the Alipay payment platform used across Alibaba's ecommerce businesses, as well as by hundreds of thousands of businesses in the country.

The employee-only Ant Financial mooncakes. Credit: weibo Credit: weibo