Alibaba Fired 4 Engineers for Mooncake Hacking

Mid-Autumn Festival may be over, but that doesn't make the story of Alibaba's mooncake hacking scandal any less hilarious.

In case you hadn't heard, the e-commerce giant devised a mooncake distribution system ahead of the holiday. The Hangzhou-headquartered company allocated a free box to each employee, offering extra boxes of four for RMB59 apiece. Each box contained Alibaba's signature mooncakes and a special orange company mascot plush toy inside.

But four devious computer engineers decided to hack the system by rigging the algorithm to get extra boxes. They did that by inserting a new program into the internal mooncake gifting website, which diverted around 100 boxes to themselves. 

Alibaba eventually caught the four and promptly fired them. They commented on the firings saying that it was "another reminder to our staff that every game comes with rules."

Which just goes to show that you should never mess with Jack Ma's mooncakes.