In just the first 68 seconds of Nov 11, shoppers spent US$1bil on Alibaba’s e-commerce marketplaces, scooping up everything from consumer electronics to luxury items and even cars.

By the end of the annual 24-hour Singles’ Day shopping extravaganza, the Chinese tech giant reported a record-shattering 268.4 billion yuan of sales.

All of this took place with “zero downtime” thanks to its cloud infrastructure and artificial intelligence (AI) technology, Alibaba Cloud said in a statement on Wednesday.

Alibaba Cloud is the data intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, which is also the parent company of the South China Morning Post.

The cloud service provider applied “multiple mature innovations to power the cloud infrastructure and other key AI-enabled features, enabling millions of businesses to reach hundreds of millions of consumers worldwide”, it said in the statement.

Here are some of the key points from the statement:

Alibaba held its first Singles’ Day shopping event in 2009 as a promotional campaign, but it has since morphed into a show of China’s collective consumer spending power.

The name comes from the date of the event, which written numerically as 11/11 looks like “bare branches”, a Chinese expression for the single and unattached. As a kind of antidote to the societal pressures of being in a relationship, many of China’s singles have begun splurging on themselves on Singles’ Day, and it has come to be seen as a type of anti-Valentine’s Day.

 - SCMP