Alibaba's mobile wallet app Alipay broke the record for most transactions per second with 256,000.
It took three years, but in December 2012, Alibaba official tradmarked 双十一 (meaning "Double 11").
Singles Day surpassed Cyber Monday as the biggest online shopping day of the year by more than double.
Alibaba CEO Jack Ma instituted the first Singles Day sales in 2009, laying the foundation for the highest grossing shopping day of the year in the world.
The accepted origin story for Singles Day is that a group of male students at Nanjing University decided that on this day they would celebrate, rather than lament, being single.
