Tencent Holdings Ltd.'s popular WeChat messaging application was down for a portion of users Monday morning, prompting a flurry of frustrated outbursts on social media in a sign of how many in the country have come to rely on the app for communication.

周一上午，部分用户无法使用腾讯控股有限公司(Tencent Holdings Ltd.)的高人气微信(WeChat)应用，社交媒体上一片抱怨之声，显示出这个国家有许多人的通讯都已经依赖这款应用。

Tencent said on a verified account on Sina Corp.'s Weibo microblogging platform that WeChat and some other Tencent services went down beginning around 8 a.m. Monday morning due to a malfunction with two optical cables in a server room.

腾讯在新浪微博的认证账号说，由于一个服务器机房的两条光缆故障，微信和其他腾讯服务从周一上午8点前后开始出现问题。

This is the first major outage Tencent's WeChat has experienced since it transformed last year from a messaging application for leading-edge smartphone users to the de facto way to chat on a smartphone in China. The problem demonstrates both how challenging it can be to operate a massively growing online service in a country with almost 600 million Internet users, and just how reliant many in China are on the company's services.

去年，微信从针对高端智能手机用户的消息应用转变为事实上的中国智能手机聊天方式，此次是微信自那以来经历的首次重大故障。此次的故障显示出，在一个有近6亿互联网用户的国家运营极速发展的网络服务可能面临多大的挑战，同时也显示出中国许多用户对于腾讯服务的依赖程度。

In March, Tencent said it had 194 million monthly active users for the service inside China. In July, it said it has 70 million registered users outside the country.

今年3月，腾讯说其微信服务在中国国内拥有1.94亿月活跃用户。7月，该公司说已有7,000万海外注册用户。

By 11 a.m. the company said on its account that service to some users had already been restored, and its engineers were working to completely fix the problem.

上午11点，该公司在其微博账户上说，部分用户的服务已经恢复，工程师们正致力于彻底解决问题。

We are very sorry for the inconvenience! If we have new information we will promptly notify users. Thank you for your understanding.

微博上的消息说，我们很抱歉给您造成不便！如有进一步信息我们会随时更新，感谢大家的理解。

If the response to Tencent's first Sina Weibo post about the outage was any indication, there was no shortage of inconvenience. Put up at 9:26 a.m., the post had already accumulated more than 16,000 comments and had been reposted more than 38,000 times by noon.

从人们对于腾讯最初在新浪微博上宣布服务故障的消息的反应来看，有不少人都因此觉得不便。这条消息于上午9点26分发布，到中午12点时已经有1.6万多条评论，被转发逾3.8万次。

The outage is unlikely to chase away users, though repeated server problems or long repair times could impact the app's growth.

这次故障不太可能会让用户掉头而去，但如果一再出现服务器故障，或是需要长时间修复，则可能影响该应用的增长。

On Sina Corp.'s Weibo microblog service, many users were relieved the problem didn't have to do with their phones or connections, but also angry at the time they spent figuring that out.

在新浪微博上，许多用户因为问题与他们的手机或网络连接无关而松了口气，但同时又为自己为弄清楚这一点而耗费的时间感到恼火。

I tried so freaking hard to log on to WeChat but failed. I thought somebody stole my account and asked for money from my friends, wrote one user under the handle Zhong Hua'er.

一位名为“钟花儿”的新浪微博用户说，早上玩命登微信登不上，以为人盗了我的号到处借钱呢。

Another user complained about wasting money on data by re-downloading WeChat, and still another wrote: WeChat you cheated my feelings. I worked on it the whole morning: restart, power off, download, unload, open the Internet access, close it You need to compensate for the time that I wasted.

另一位用户抱怨重新下载微信让他因为耗费数量流量而浪费了钱，还有一位用户写道，微信你欺骗了我的感情，我折腾一上午，开机，关机，下载，卸载，开网，关网，你赔我时间。

Still, the majority of the messages were filled with much weeping and gnashing of teeth, often in the form of rows of various melancholy emoticons.

不过，大多数信息都是哭泣的脸或是咬牙切齿的表情，常常是成排的各种表达沮丧情绪的表情图标。

Commenting on this, user Xiaomiao Laoba perhaps said it best: The breakdown triggered so much online discussions. It says we are already in a WeChat society.

用户“小淼老爸”的评论或许一针见血：微信故障引发无数网络吐槽……足见我们已经是微信社会！

[UPDATE 12:30 p.m.: Tencent said in a Sina Weibo post at 12:20 p.m. that local government construction work on a road led to the severing of two optical cables, ultimately causing the outage. It said it is cooperating with the relevant departments to replace the cables with new ones.

【中午12点20分，腾讯在新浪微博上说，因市政道路施工导致通信光缆被挖断，影响了微信服务器的正常连接。腾讯方面说，正和相关部门一起全力抢修，更换光缆。】