Couples in Wuhan in China’s Hubei province are rushing to get married after the epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic lifted its lockdown on Wednesday.

Chinese technology company Alipay, that runs a local marriage application system, on Thursday said that the platform had witnessed a 300 per cent increase in traffic as the city lifted its lockdown. This had also caused its system to temporarily crash.

Alipay, in a social media post, had also announced that the company will offer couples to search and find the baby names that have already been used by others.

“The number of visits to the applet of the wedding meeting in Wuhan exceeded expectations, by about 300 per cent …, which caused a temporary freeze. The destination system did not crash, but it can be a little slow. Just update it a few more times,” the company had said in an official post on the Chinese social media platform Weibo as quoted by the Week .

Applications for marriage had been suspended during February and March when the city had been completely shut down owing to the rising number of cases of Covid-19.

The city's 11 million residents who were subjected to a 76-day lockdown were allowed to leave their homes as the city lifted the lockdown on Wednesday, according to media reports.

Wuhan had reported over 50,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19 with the death toll surpassing 2,500 which was about 80 per cent of all deaths in China.

The virus has infected over 1.6 million people worldwide as of April 10, according to reports.

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