As governments and enterprises worldwide assess the fallout from the massive CrowdStrike-Microsoft outage, mainland China sees its push for “safe and controllable” computing systems paying off, with the world's second-largest economy emerging unscathed from the incident. The outage unfolded on July 19, just as businesses across the Asia-Pacific were winding down for the evening. First, customers of major Australian and New Zealand banks could not access their accounts. The rest of the region followed an hour later, with processing systems at airports in Hong Kong, Singapore, India and Japan all going down and numerous airlines cancelling or delaying their flights. Austin, Texas-based CrowdStrike this week blamed a bug in a software update that allowed its cybersecurity systems to push bad data out to millions of client computers, which set off last week’s global tech outage that grounded flights, took television broadcasts off-air, and disrupted banks, hospitals and retailers. While that disruption affected 8.5 million Microsoft Windows-based devices worldwide, China saw only minimal impact on installations numbering “tens of thousands” at mostly local offices of foreign enterprises or their mainland joint ventures, according to a report by cybersecurity systems provider QAX in Beijing. “The use [of CrowdStrike cybersecurity products] in government, state-owned enterprises and large private corporations is extremely small,” the report said. QAX, a spin-off from the enterprise business of Shenzhen-listed 360 Security Technology, said organisations on the mainland should “prioritise domestic suppliers” of cybersecurity software, “especially given the current complex international environment”. Citing Beijing’s efforts since 2018 to promote the development of alternative local solutions for cybersecurity, QAX said: “[We] must ensure that security software, tools and platforms, which are as significant as operating systems, should be self-supporting and controllable.” QAX estimated that it would take weeks for many organisations around the world to fully recover from the outage. That incident adds to Beijing’s list of reasons for seeking to move away from foreign technology, as it pursues self-reliance in the face of mounting export restrictions and sanctions from Washington. Chinese cybersecurity stocks gained the most on Monday compared with other industries, with an average increase of 4 per cent, according to financial information provider Wind, which compiles an index of more than 40 companies in the sector listed in Shanghai and Shenzhen. The mainland's cybersecurity market is dominated by local players. Beijing has long been phasing out software from companies like Russia’s Kaspersky Lab and US-based Symantec. CrowdStrike does not sell products and services in China, according to its website. The massive tech outage has come years after CrowdStrike blamed China for cybersecurity incidents at US firms. As early as 2015, CrowdStrike reported several Chinese cyberattacks against US technology and pharmaceutical companies, which were denied by China’s foreign ministry. In its latest annual report, CrowdStrike said the “China-nexus adversaries increasingly targeted third-party relationships” in 2023. David Ip Ching-yeung, the founding chairman of the Hong Kong China Network Security Association, said the mainland is not immune to disruptions because it is possible for every software development company to make mistakes. As such, Ip said governments and businesses must have redundant systems. That means when the primary system collapses, the backup can take over to ensure continuity of operations. China’s cybersecurity market was projected to grow 13.5 per cent annually from 2022 to reach US$23 billion by 2027, faster than the global industry’s annual growth of 11.7 per cent in the same period, according to tech market research firm IDC. scmp.com/tech/policy/arti.. #A Glance of China 行摄中国