“Friday’s CrowdStrike incident had a very small impact on China, with little impact on public life in the country,” Gao Feng, a senior research director at Gartner, said in Chinese and translated by CNBC. “Only some foreign companies in China were affected.”
“The main reason is that domestic Chinese companies are not affected because they do not use CrowdStrike’s products,” Gao said. “CrowdStrike’s customers are mainly concentrated in Europe and the United States.”
Anecdotally, China’s ride-hailing services, e-commerce and other internet-connected systems were all operating smoothly on Friday. Chinese state media also said on Friday evening that international flights at Beijing’s two airports were operating normally, Air China, China Eastern and China Southern had Not affected Due to a massive technical systems failure.
One of the most notable effects of the IT outage, including in China, is Microsoft Your Windows device is attempting to integrate an update for CrowdStrike’s Falcon product. Blue screen and computer restarts repeatedly.
Microsoft products are widely used in China: About 87% of PCs shipped in mainland China last year were Windows, according to Canalys, a figure higher than the 79% global share in the first quarter of this year, the research firm said.
The hashtag “Thank you Microsoft. [I can] “Leave early” was the second most popular comment on Chinese social media platform Weibo as the blackout began to spread early Friday afternoon local time, with posts mostly featuring photos of the “blue screen” or discussing the global blackout.
However, the hashtag’s popularity was quickly supplanted by one about domestic issues, such as Chinese smartphone companies. Xiaomi product launch in Beijing That night.
Microsoft’s products Office 365 and Azure cloud Operated in China By a local company 21 VianetIt was not immediately clear whether localization was a factor in Friday’s limited impact, and the companies did not immediately respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.
In recent years, U.S. and Chinese governments have been encouraging domestic companies to use homegrown technology and store data domestically, citing national security concerns.
Canaris pointed out Chinese-made UOS, Or as it’s called, the Unity operating system, it’s seeing growing adoption among state-owned enterprises and government departments, but Windows still dominates the country’s personal computer market.
“CrowdStrike is hardly used in China, so it had very little impact,” said Rich Bishop, CEO of AppInChina, which sells international software in China.
“This is because many of the security threats that CrowdStrike is designed to defend against come from China,” he said, adding that Chinese companies typically use Chinese products. Tencent360 and other businesses.
In its latest annual cyber threat report, CrowdStrike said that last year “China-linked adversaries continued to operate at an unparalleled pace around the world, leveraging stealth and scale to collect mass surveillance data, strategic intelligence and intellectual property on targets.”
—CNBC’s Ryan Brown contributed to this report.
