Inside the Race to Fix a Potentially Disastrous Software Flaw

An employee on Alibaba’s cloud-security team alerted Apache’s developers of the flaw and urged them to ‘please hurry up’

At 2:51 p.m. on Nov. 24, members of an open-source software project received an alarming email. The contents threatened to undermine years of programming by a small group of volunteers and unleash massive cyberattacks across the globe.

“I want to report a security bug,” wrote Chen Zhaojun, an employee on Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s cloud-security team, adding “the vulnerability has a major impact.”