Food Delivery
Ele.me
Ele.me is one of China's largest food delivery platforms, owned by Alibaba, connecting users with restaurants and grocery stores across hundreds of cities.
What is Ele.me?
Ele.me — the name translates roughly to "Are you hungry?" — launched in Shanghai in 2008 as one of China's earliest online food ordering platforms, predating the smartphone era and starting with web-based ordering for university cafeterias. The platform evolved through the smartphone revolution into one of the dominant food delivery services in China, competing intensely with Meituan across hundreds of cities. Alibaba acquired a controlling stake in 2018 and took the company private, integrating it into the Alibaba ecosystem alongside Alipay, Taobao, and Alibaba's other consumer services.
Ele.me operates a three-sided marketplace connecting consumers, restaurants, and delivery riders. The consumer-facing app handles order placement, payment through Alipay integration, and real-time delivery tracking. Restaurant merchants manage their menus, pricing, and order acceptance through Ele.me's merchant platform. The delivery network is a combination of employed and gig-economy riders coordinated through dispatch algorithms that optimise routing and delivery time. Alibaba's integration has deepened Ele.me's ties to the broader Alibaba consumer ecosystem, including promotional integrations with Taobao and membership benefits through 88VIP.
Platform failures at Ele.me affect all three sides of the marketplace simultaneously in ways that compound each other. Consumer order placement failures prevent revenue from entering the system entirely. Restaurant order management failures mean restaurants receive no incoming orders even when consumers can technically place them, or receive orders they cannot acknowledge. Rider dispatch failures leave accepted orders waiting for assignment while food cools. Payment processing failures through Alipay break the checkout flow for the majority of users who depend on Alipay as their payment method. During peak meal periods — particularly lunch and dinner on weekdays — system slowdowns can create cascading delays that affect hours of delivery operations.
Outage.gg tracks Ele.me service availability through community reports from consumers, restaurant operators, and delivery riders. If Ele.me ordering is failing, delivery tracking is not updating, or the merchant platform is inaccessible, the live status page shows what users across the platform are currently experiencing.
Common Ele.me Problems
Issues users most frequently report when Ele.me is having problems.
Login failures
Players are unable to sign in, receiving authentication errors or being stuck on loading screens.
Matchmaking problems
Unable to find or join matches, long queue times, or errors when trying to connect to game servers.
Disconnections mid-session
Getting unexpectedly kicked from active sessions, losing in-game progress or items.
In-game store & purchases
Cannot load the in-game store, complete purchases, or received items are not appearing in inventory.
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about Ele.me outages and server status.
You can check the live Ele.me server status at outage.gg/services/ele-me. The page shows real-time community-submitted outage reports, an hourly trend chart, and the current health status.
Ele.me can stop working for a number of reasons including scheduled maintenance windows, unexpected server failures, network infrastructure problems, or DDoS attacks. Check the live status page on Outage.gg for the latest community reports to see if others are experiencing the same issue.
Go to outage.gg/services/ele-me and click the "Report an Issue" button. Your report is counted immediately and helps confirm whether a problem is widespread. Reports from multiple users trigger a status change visible to everyone watching the page.
Click the "Notify Me" bell button on the Ele.me status page at outage.gg/services/ele-me. Create a free account and we will send you an email the moment Ele.me comes back online — no app download required.
Many services maintain official status pages with planned maintenance notices. Outage.gg aggregates real-time community-reported outages which often surface faster than official channels.
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