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CrowdStrike-Microsoft outage: China avoids disruption on back of cybersecurity drive
- China saw minimal impact from the outage in installations numbering ‘tens of thousands’ at mostly local offices of foreign enterprises
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Coco Fengin Beijing
Mainland China’s self-sufficiency drive in cybersecurity enabled the world’s second-largest economy to emerge unscathed from Microsoft’s global outage of cloud computing services, according to industry insiders, after a botched software update by US tech firm CrowdStrike.
While that disruption affected 8.5 million Microsoft Windows-based devices worldwide, China saw only minimal impact in installations numbering “tens of thousands” at mostly local offices of foreign enterprises or their mainland joint ventures, according to a report on Sunday by cybersecurity systems provider QAX in Beijing.
“The use [of CrowdStrike cybersecurity products] in government, state-owned enterprises and large private corporations is extremely small,” the report said.
QAX, a spin-off from the enterprise business of Shenzhen-listed 360 Security Technology, said organisations on the mainland should “prioritise domestic suppliers” of cybersecurity software, “especially given the current complex international environment”.
Citing Beijing’s efforts since 2018 to promote the development of alternative local solutions for cybersecurity, QAX said: “[We] must ensure that security software, tools and platforms, which are as significant as operating systems, should be self-supporting and controllable.”
Coco Feng joined the Post in 2019, covering the technology and internet sector from the Greater Bay Area. Previously, she worked at the Post's Beijing bureau.
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