“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, e-commerce and other internet-connected systems were all operating smoothly on Friday. Chinese state media also reported that international flights at Beijing’s two airports were operating normally on Friday evening, and that Air China, China Eastern Airlines and China Southern Airlines were not affected by the major technical systems outage.
One of the most visible impacts of the IT outage, including in China, was that Microsoft Windows devices attempting to integrate updates for CrowdStrike’s Falcon product experienced blue screens and repeated computer reboots.
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.
As the outage began to spread early Friday afternoon local time, the hashtag “Thanks Microsoft, we can take off (soon)” was ranked second on Chinese social media platform Weibo, with posts mainly showing photos of the “blue screen” and discussing the global outage.
But the hashtag’s popularity was quickly supplanted by domestic issues, including a product launch event held in Beijing by Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi that evening.
Microsoft’s Office 365 products and Azure cloud are run in China by a local company called 21Vianet. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the limited impact on Friday was due to localization. The companies did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request 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.
Canalys noted that while Windows still dominates the domestic PC market, the Chinese-made UOS (Unity Operating System) is being adopted by state-owned enterprises and government departments.
“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 in part because many of the security threats that CrowdStrike is designed to defend against originate from China,” he said, adding that Chinese companies typically use products from companies such as Tencent and 360.
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.
