Why Friday’s IT outage didn’t affect China? One reason

Luc Williams

As Microsoft announced on Saturday, Global Windows outage related to CrowdStrike’s software update affected nearly 8.5 million devices worldwide. Meanwhile, in China the problem was almost imperceptible.

“The impact of Friday’s CrowdStrike incident in China was very small and had almost no impact on domestic public life,” Gao Feng, senior research director at Gartner, said in Chinese, according to CNBC. “It only affected some foreign companies in China.”

In China everything worked

According to Gao The resilience of China’s IT system is due to one reason. Local Chinese companies generally do not use CrowdStrike products “CrowdStrike’s customers are mainly concentrated in Europe and the United States,” Gao said, according to CNBC.

As reported by CNBC, on Friday Passenger transportation, e-commerce and other internet-connected systems in China operated smoothly. Chinese state media also reported Friday evening that international flights at Beijing’s two airports were operating normally. Also Air China, China Eastern Airlines and China Southern Airlines did not experience any serious technical system failures.

Chinese companies do not use CrowdStrike

Microsoft products are widely used in China. Windows accounted for about 87% of PC shipments in China last year, according to technology research firm Canalys. That’s up from the 79% share for the rest of the world in the first quarter of this year.

However, Canalys pointed out that the production in China, the UOS system, or Unity Operating System, is becoming increasingly popular among state-owned enterprises and government sectors. Meanwhile, Windows continues to dominate the domestic personal computer market.

The impact was very small because CrowdStrike is rarely used in China” Rich Bishop, CEO of AppInChina, which distributes international software in China, told CNBC. He said that’s partly because many of the security threats CrowdStrike is designed to protect against come from China. He added that Chinese companies usually use Chinese software from Tencent, 360 and other companies.

About LUC WILLIAMS

Luc's expertise lies in assisting students from a myriad of disciplines to refine and enhance their thesis work with clarity and impact. His methodical approach and the knack for simplifying complex information make him an invaluable ally for any thesis writer.