The Microsoft Windows outage that led to chaotic situations all over the world and affected foreign businesses and luxury hotels in China left the China’s key infrastructure, from airlines to banks, largely unaffected. There have been no reports in mainland China of infrastructure breakdowns, while many airports in the Asia-Pacific region, from Hong Kong to Australia, were hit with disruptions. The international airports in Beijing and Shanghai were operating normally. At the same time, the Windows error that resulted in a “blue screen of death” on computers became a hot topic on Chinese social media platforms such as Weibo, as many foreign business offices across the country were affected by the breakdown. Many employees at foreign firms in China experienced the “blue screen of death” on their Windows PCs and “502 Bad Gateway” error when trying to access their companies' websites. On Xiaohongshu, an Instagram-like Chinese social media platform, multiple users complained about the difficulty in checking into international franchise hotels such as Sheraton, Marriott and Hyatt in Chinese cities.
As China’s public services largely remained unaffected, Microsoft’s China website and social media channels did not issue any emergency notices. China’s relative immunity to the outage showed the country’s reduced reliance on foreign service providers such as Microsoft and the antivirus company CrowdStrike. In recent years, China has been rolling out a campaign across its government departments and key infrastructure operators to replace foreign hardware and systems with domestic ones. The outages were caused by a software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which hit Windows-based systems worldwide. The minimal impact of the Microsoft outage in China has proved that the country has made progress in achieving its goal of “safe and controllable” computing systems, according to one Chinese government employee. On Weibo, Chinese netizens joked that Microsoft “has given them a half-day off”. One commenter said that “our company just switched to new computers with Huawei's HarmonyOS system, so we can’t join in your celebration”.
Chinese cybersecurity companies are taking advantage of the massive Microsoft Windows outage by promoting their own software. 360 Security Technology, China’s largest cybersecurity firm, claimed its software was “more reliable, stable, comprehensive and intelligent”. QAX wrote in a blog post that “software vendors involved in system stability need to have stricter quality control of their software”. China’s cybersecurity market is dominated by local players. Beijing has long been phasing out software from companies like Russia’s Kaspersky Lab and U.S.-based Symantec. CrowdStrike does not sell products and services in China. The incident adds to Beijing’s list of reasons for seeking to move away from foreign technology as it pursues technological self-reliance in the face of mounting export restrictions and sanctions from Washington, the South China Morning Post reports.
