Microsoft's global outage sparks heated debate over China's reliance on US technology

The unexpected outage of US technology giant Microsoft on Friday brought a sudden impact on global business, and many topics related to "Microsoft blue screen" became the hot search on Weibo. Many Chinese netizens believe that this incident highlights the risk that the US may paralyze China's network if a war breaks out between the US and China.

This Friday, a global technical failure occurred in the Microsoft system in the United States, causing serious service interruptions. According to the New York Times, this failure caused a chain reaction, not only did a large number of flights around the world stop, the medical systems of hospitals around the world were paralyzed, parcel and express services were forced to be interrupted, and the emergency telephones in many states in the United States were even unable to be connected.

The New York Times reported that after the accident, Microsoft pointed out that the technical failure was caused by the fact that Microsoft's system used the anti-hacking and external intrusion service provided by the network security company CrowdStrike, and the updated software recently released by CrowdStrike was the root cause of the failure.

George Kurtz, CEO of Dunyang Technology, posted on the social platform X (formerly Twitter) that the company has discovered and resolved the problem, and Dunyang Technology has sent a fix to its customers, but the fix may take some time. Kurtz also pointed out that the company is deeply sorry for the impact of this accident, but this incident is not a security incident or a cyber attack.

Chinese netizens: The victims of this incident are all foreign companies using genuine products

In China, the problem of Microsoft server failure also attracted attention, and many topics related to "Microsoft blue screen" also became hot searches on Weibo. Many netizens said that the main affected companies were foreign companies using genuine Microsoft systems. Netizens left messages saying "To put it bluntly, the genuine version has problems, and pirated versions are completely safe", "CrowdStrike is basically only available in the enterprise version, and it cannot serve the mainland, so basically foreign companies are affected", "Because foreign companies will install genuine systems."

Regarding the view that Chinese netizens benefited from the accident because of "using pirated software" and "de-Americanization", Wang Jian, a senior media person living in the United States, said in an interview with this station that this view is a fallacy in understanding technology. Wang Jian said that first, the pirated system did not crash because it did not install the security anti-hacking software provided by Dunyang Technology. Secondly, the Beijing authorities have been promoting the "de-Americanization" of technology for a long time, but the actual effect is actually very poor.

Wang Jian said: "China has been working on 'de-Americanization', from hardware to software. Government departments are not allowed to buy foreign computers or install foreign computer platforms, but in fact ('de-Americanization') is not done well. The reason for this is that Chinese domestic products are not good. Their office efficiency and usage effectiveness have been greatly impacted and cannot be used normally. Even many government offices cannot print because they have installed domestic platform software."

Wang Jian added: "So many government departments follow the regulations and install 10 domestic computers, and then secretly install one or two imported computers. For really urgent matters, they still use imported computers and Windows."

Opinion: Microsoft crash highlights cybersecurity risks in US-China war

At the same time, another issue that Chinese netizens are concerned about is that although the impact of this Microsoft failure on China is not as great as that on the United States, it still highlights that once a war breaks out between the United States and China, the United States may cut off its servers in order to gain an advantage on the battlefield. Netizens said: "What if the war breaks out? Now you know?", "Imagine if we go to war with the United States", "It's terrible, Microsoft's blue screen, most of the computer system industry is affected. Think about Apple and Tesla, they should quickly make domestic systems."

Regarding the possibility of a war between the United States and China, Simon, a network engineer working in the U.S. defense industry, told our reporter that the U.S. government may indeed ask U.S. companies to cut off services to China in wartime.

Simon said: "If a war breaks out between the United States and China, it is possible that the US government will ask Microsoft to cut off its servers, because some of China's military operations are likely to still use Microsoft, such as ballistic analysis systems. China is now striving to develop cloud services, which is to build servers that are completely independent of the United States. I think the ultimate goal of the Chinese government is to make its government system completely free of Microsoft. At present, China's key military technologies may have achieved this goal, but some government departments may not have met the standards for public services and still need to use Microsoft services."

Experts: Chinese people do not need to overreact to a single unexpected event

However, Xie Jiaye, president of the US-China Technology Exchange Association in New York, said in an interview that he believed the Microsoft outage was a single accident and that the Chinese public did not need to over-interpret or over-react: "I don't know where they (Chinese netizens) get this kind of thinking from, saying that without the US system, it will achieve (complete network stability). Its own system will also have this kind of (crash) situation. This kind of accident is entirely possible. ... I think (the public) should not go to extremes and use extreme thinking to look at an accident that happened by chance."