Case Study: Micro-Alliance Database Deletion Incident and Its Legal Consequences

In February 2020, a core operations engineer at Micro-Alliance (Wei Meng) accessed the internal network via VPN and deliberately deleted the company's production and backup databases, causing the SaaS platform to be unavailable for eight days and affecting more than 3 million users.

The incident erased over ten billion yuan of market value in a single day, incurred millions of yuan in compensation, data recovery, and overtime costs, and forced many merchants to halt their businesses.

Investigations revealed that the perpetrator, He, was under severe personal and financial pressure, including unpaid online loans and isolation during the pandemic, which motivated the destructive act.

He was arrested on February 24, confessed to the crime, and on August 26, 2020, the Shanghai Baoshan District People's Court sentenced him to six years in prison and confiscated his laptop as the tool used for the crime.

The court found that He violated national regulations by deleting stored data, causing especially serious consequences, thereby constituting the crime of destroying computer information systems.

Micro-Alliance later reported a net loss of 5.46 billion yuan for the first half of 2020, with the deletion incident accounting for an estimated 0.87 billion yuan in compensation.

Similar cases were cited, including a former Cisco employee who deleted 456 virtual machines, causing a loss of about US$2.4 million, and other incidents in Chinese companies resulting in significant financial penalties.

The article concludes with a warning that enterprises must strengthen security mechanisms and management policies, and that technical staff should avoid impulsive actions that could lead to criminal liability.