(Yicai Global) Nov. 28 -- AcFun.cn, the first barrage video website in the Chinese mainland, has resumed operations last night and its employees work as usual, reported it.sohu.com, citing a company spokesperson. The company's announcement follows media reports suggesting that the website, popular among young Chinese users, was shut down by authorities for three days. The regulator punished the website for failure to obtain necessary licenses in the past.

The rumors were sparked by the fact that no employees were working during the weekend, which made the website inaccessible, claimed Yuan Lei, public relations director of AcFun. However, Yuan did not disclose the reason for the user login failures for three days in a row. "The loss of physical connection due to some external intrusion" caused the failure in website login, claimed the company via its social media account earlier.

However, some users reported occasional login failures in the past. Starting from August 2016, the homepage of AcFun.cn has been inaccessible time to time, but this is the first time that such failure lasted three days.

Founded in 2007, AcFun.cn has a large number of young followers as it mainly runs 'Animation, Comic, Game' (ACG) videos. It has secured investment from multiple institutional investors, and was valued as high as CNY1.85 billion (USD280 million) after its series-A financing in 2014. However, it posted a loss of CNY146 million, and a total debt of CNY148 million as of the end of third quarter of this year, show publicly available data.