Crowdstrike: How China avoided the worst of a global tech collapse

While much of the world was plagued by the blue screen of death on Friday, one country that escaped largely unscathed was China.

The reason is actually quite simple: CrowdStrike is barely used there.

Few organizations will be buying software from a U.S. company that has been vocal in the past about cybersecurity threats posed by Beijing.

Additionally, China is not as reliant on Microsoft as other countries are, with domestic companies like Alibaba, Tencent and Huawei being the major cloud providers.

So while there were reports of outages in China, they were mostly at foreign companies and organizations. On Chinese social media sites, for example, some users complained that they were unable to check into international hotel chains such as Sheraton, Marriott and Hyatt in Chinese cities.

In recent years, governments, companies and infrastructure operators have increasingly been replacing foreign IT systems with domestic ones. Some analysts are calling these parallel networks the “splinternet.”

“This is evidence of China’s strategic approach to foreign technology activities,” said Josh Kennedy White, a Singapore-based cybersecurity expert.

“Microsoft operates in China through our local partner, 21Vianet, which manages its services independently of the global infrastructure. This structure ensures that China’s critical services, like banking and aviation, are protected from global disruptions.”

Beijing sees avoiding reliance on foreign systems as a way to strengthen its national security.

This is similar to how some Western countries banned technology from Chinese tech company Huawei in 2019, and Britain’s move to ban the use of Chinese-owned TikTok on government equipment in 2023.

Since then, the United States has launched a concerted effort to ban the sale of advanced semiconductor chip technology to China and has also tried to block American companies from investing in Chinese technology, all of which the U.S. government says are for national security reasons.

An editorial published Saturday in the state-run Global Times newspaper alluded to such restrictions on Chinese technology.

“It is ironic that some countries constantly talk about security and generalize the concept of security, but ignore actual security,” the editorial said.

The argument here is that the US is trying to dictate the terms of who can use the world’s technology and how, but one of its own companies is inadvertently causing global chaos.

The Global Times also criticized internet giants for “monopolizing” the industry, saying “relying solely on top companies to tackle network security, as some countries claim, not only hinders the inclusive sharing of governance achievements but may also bring new security risks.”

The term “sharing” appears to allude to a debate over intellectual property, as China is often accused of copying or stealing Western technology. Beijing denies this and advocates an open global tech market while maintaining tight control over its own.

But not all was unaffected in China, with a small number of workers expressing their gratitude to the American software giant for finishing the work week early.

“Thank you Microsoft for the early holiday” trended on social media site Weibo on Friday, with users posting photos of the blue error screen.