Read More Whowould win a World Cup for energysavings? Many observers assumed Tencent had blocked Alipay to boost usage of its competing online payments engine Tenpay, a charge Tencent denies. Tenpay has struggled to gain market share amid Alipay's dominance of online payment – estimated by Beijing internet company iResearch at 50 per cent against Tenpay's 20 per cent. The lively exchange escalated to a war of words in which Alipay derided Tencent's explanation for the outage as "bullshit" on its official Weibo feed.