TENCENT Cloud and Tiantian Ptu, two business units under Internet giant Tencent, responded Saturday to an accusation made by Tapai, a women-oriented short video sharing app, denying there had been a technical attack on the app.

However, the two apologized for not having informed Tapai 24 hours in advance of technical upgrades that were made to their service platforms, thepaper.cn reported.

Tencent Cloud is a cloud service provider, while Tiantian Ptu is a photo-editing app.

In July 2018, Tapai launched a mini app called “她face+” on Tencent’s WeChat platform and also moved its server to Tencent Cloud, said Wang Hongda, founder of Tapai.

Tapai also spent 5 million yuan (US$730,502) to purchase and use a technology launched by Tencent Cloud called “Face Fusion,” becoming a big customer.

The mini app was officially launched in August. However, on Sept. 5, users of Tapai found that the picture quality of the synthesized images had declined dramatically, and the technical issues seemed to come from Tencent Cloud. The company didn’t reject the charge.

Tapai said that at the same time as the quality of its own pictures declined, a similar mini app called “Crazy Face Change” was launched by Tiantian Ptu. After several upgrades, the UI interface and the operating process of “Crazy Face Change” have become very similar to “她face+,” and their synthesized images are in high definition.

“We were not informed of the technical upgrades in advance, while at the same time Tiantian Ptu was promoting its own app like crazy. It’s hard for me to accept the statement that their service upgrades accidentally hurt ‘她face+.’ It even makes me suspect that this is a malicious technological change aimed against us,” said Wang.

Tapai’s photo package stopped updating Sept. 27. According to Wang, failure to update is tantamount to giving up on a product. The abnormal data changes have also aroused some doubts from prospective investors, he said.

Tapai filed two separate lawsuits against Tencent Cloud for breach of contract at Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court and Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court, claiming 100 million yuan in compensation.

In response to the decline in picture quality, Tencent Cloud said the interface of “Face Fusion” had been upgraded for all partners and that it hadn’t carried out a technical attack on Tapai. Meanwhile, the company claimed that “Crazy Face Change” is an extension of Tiantian Ptu and hasn’t plagiarized.

According to the news report, the court in Shenzhen rejected the application for a court filing due to jurisdictional issues, but Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court has formally accepted the case and will schedule a hearing. (Zhang Yu)