Kuaishou Cyberattack Disrupts Livestreaming, Triggers Sharp Stock Decline

Chinese short-video and livestreaming platform Kuaishou, a leading competitor to TikTok, experienced a highly coordinated cyberattack on December 22, 2025, around 10 p.m. local time, which significantly disrupted its core livestreaming operations. Organized criminal groups, often referred to as “black and grey industries,” used nearly 17,000 automated bots and AI-driven tools to overwhelm the platform. These bots flooded popular live rooms with illegal explicit, violent, and pornographic content at extremely high speeds. As a result, viewership in affected rooms surged beyond 50,000 users before moderators could respond, exposing more than 85 million active streamers to prohibited material for close to 90 minutes and breaching China’s strict content regulations.Kuaishou promptly launched its emergency response by deleting the malicious content in bulk, shutting down livestreaming channels by 11:30 p.m., and isolating impacted systems. Services were gradually restored by about 2 a.m. on December 23, while other features, such as short videos, remained largely unaffected, although some delays continued during recovery. The company reported the incident to law enforcement and regulators and committed to pursuing legal action. Security analysts noted that the attack revealed weaknesses in human-dependent moderation when faced with large-scale automated assaults. The incident also sparked a strong market reaction. Shares of the Hong Kong-listed company (HKEX: 01024) dropped as much as 6% to a one-month low of HK$62.7, wiping out billions in market value and prompting closer regulatory scrutiny of platform security. Additionally, reports of possible data exposure, including usernames, phone numbers, addresses, and order information, raised concerns about subsequent fraud and phishing risks. Described as an “unprecedented” event, the attack highlights the growing threat of AI-enhanced abuse targeting live-commerce platforms and the increasing gap between bot-driven attacks and traditional security defenses across Kuaishou’s 416 million-user ecosystem.