Users of a leading Chinese betting site found their efforts to place bets on World Cup games thwarted yesterday amid a spat between the country’s two largest internet groups over who was to blame for the outage of an online payments engine.

With deciding games in the tournament’s first stage about to be played, tempers frayed when visitors to Tencent’s mobile betting site QQ Lottery were told they would not be accepting payments from Alipay, the online payments arm of Tencent’s rival, ecommerce company Alibaba.

Tencent insisted it was a technical problem caused by delays in account transfers on the Alipay side, “which negatively affects the user experience” on its QQ betting site. But, customers were sceptical. One user of Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, responded with an emoticon of a face picking its nose and asked: “Is this really the reason?”