Passengers look at a screen displaying delayed flights at Barcelona Airport on July 19, 2024 in Barcelona, Spain. Photo: VCG

The Microsoft global outage has raised the alarm that China has to control the security of its computer and network system by itself and that the country requires domestic antivirus software for its own computer systems, Zhou Hongyi, founder and chairman of 360 Security Technology said after the reported world’s biggest IT failure affected Windows users across the globe. 

Approximately 8.5 million Windows devices worldwide experienced a “blue screen of death” outage on Friday, impacting airlines, railways, banks, enterprises, TV broadcasters, supermarkets, and many more businesses across various sectors worldwide. 

Microsoft’s “blue screen of death” has been used for decades since 1993 to tell Windows users that their computers’ operating systems are down. 

The Friday’s worldwide outage was caused by an update fiasco from the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which provides antivirus software to Microsoft for its Windows devices. 

Despite the blue screen influenced millions globally on Friday, grounding flights, knocking broadcasters off the air and disconnecting some emergency phone lines, Chinese mainland enterprises’ exposure was minimal, and most industries have remained undisturbed.

Zhou released a video on Saturday, explaining the reason why Chinese mainland Windows users were not affected is that approximately 90 percent of Windows users in the mainland use the antivirus software developed by the domestic cybersecurity company 360 Security Technology. 

Zhou thinks that the Microsoft worldwide outage has raised the alarm that China has to control the security of its computer and network system by itself and that the country requires domestic antivirus software for its own computer systems. 

“This is the only way to ensure that a small bug, a minor update, or minor attack will not cause an outage to the entire society, city or country in the era of digitalization and intelligence,” Zhou said. 

According to global aviation analytics firm Cirium, out of more than 110,000 scheduled commercial flights on Friday, 5,000 had been cancelled globally with more expected as of Saturday, Reuters reported. 

The global Microsoft meltdown also affected Hong Kong’s airport on Friday, forcing passengers to queue in long lines and some airlines to switch to manual check-in to continue serving passengers, though flight operations were not affected. 

Since cloud computing services of CrowdStrike has not been sold in the Chinese mainland, the flight operations at airports across the Chinese mainland were not affected, according to yicai.com. 

Domestic hotel chains such as Home Inn and H World International were not affected by the incident and only a few international hotel chains in the mainland were affected, yicai.com reported. 

Global Times