Here’s why China was largely unaffected by Friday’s IT outage

Evelyn Cheng

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While businesses in the U.S. and Europe woke up Friday to a global IT outage that disrupted airports and hotels, China went into its weekend largely unaffected.

The issue traced back to a software update by Texas-based cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, which generates more than half its revenue from the United States. The company’s tech is used by many of the world’s largest banks, health-care and energy companies.

“The impact of Friday’s CrowdStrike incident on China was very small, with almost no impact on domestic public life,” Gao Feng, senior research director at Gartner, said in Chinese, translated by CNBC. “Only some foreign companies in China were affected.”

“The main reason why is that local Chinese companies basically do not use CrowdStrike products, so they are not affected,” Gao said. “CrowdStrike’s customers are primarily concentrated in Europe and the United States.”

Anecdotally, ride-hailing, e-commerce and other internet-connected systems in China were all running smoothly on Friday. Chinese state media also said Friday evening that international flights at Beijing’s two airports were running normally, and that Air China, China Eastern Airlines and China Southern Airlines had not been affected by large-scale technical system failures.