Microsoft outage leaves China largely unaffected despite causing global disruptions, here's why

A global tech outage that appeared to be related to issues at cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, and Microsoft, affected operations at airports, airlines, banks, and media outlets on Friday.

CrowdStrike is not a household name but it is an $83 billion company with more than 20,000 subscribers around the world including Amazon.com, and Microsoft. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said on social media platform X that a defect was found "in a single content update for Windows hosts" that affected Microsoft customers.

However, according to a report in the South China Morning Post, amid the global outage, China remained predominantly unaffected, according to industry sources and social media posts. There were no reports of China facing any major infrastructure breakdowns. The international airports in Beijing and Shanghai, as per their website, were operating normally. 

On Weibo, Chinese netizens jokingly said that Microsoft "has given them a half-day off". One said that "Our company just switched to new computers with the HarmonyOS system, so we can't join in your celebration".

Microsoft's China website and social media channels avoided issuing any emergency notices as China's public services remained mostly unaffected due to the outage. 

Why did the Microsoft outage not affect China? 

The main reason why the Microsoft outage did not affect China is because Microsoft's cloud services in the country are mostly operated by local partner 21Vianet. Due to China's regulatory provision that makes it compulsory for foreign cloud services to be run by domestic companies, their set-up is largely separate from Microsoft's global infrastructure.

This makes the configurations and functions of Microsoft's services in China distinguishable and protected from issues affecting other parts of the world. This separation is one of the main reasons why Microsoft's services remained largely unaffected in China despite causing major disorders in other parts of the world.

(With Reuters inputs)

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