Tech outage leaves China unscathed, showcasing drive for self-sufficiency

Use of home-grown CrowdStrike alternatives kept blue screen at bay

- Joyce ZK Lim

While a massive tech outage last week caused disruption across sectors and services globally, including at airports, banks and hospitals, it was largely business as usual in China.

Essential services ran unimpeded, and the "blue screen of death" mainly afflicted foreign companies in the country.

The world's second-largest economy sidestepped the July 19 outage due to its limited exposure to US-based cyber-security firm CrowdStrike, whose faulty software update caused some 8.5 million Microsoft Windows devices to crash worldwide.

"The number of Chinese users of CrowdStrike's software is very small, so there wasn't too big of an impact on China," Dr Li Xiaodong, vice-chairman of the Internet Society of China, told The Straits Times.

Dr Li is also the founder and chief executive of the Fuxi Institution, which studies the internet and digital economy.

Qi-Anxin Technology, a Beijing-based cyber-security firm, estimates that devices in China on which CrowdStrike software is installed number in the "tens of thousands".

Instead, many use home-grown alternatives, including security software from the Beijing-based 360 Security Technology, and cloud services from Hangzhou-based Alibaba and Shenzhen-based Tencent.

"Ninety per cent of China's computers and the vast majority of businesses use 360's antivirus software," claimed Mr Zhou Hongyi, the company's co-founder, in a video uploaded to his account on microblogging platform Weibo on July 20.