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Why China Was Not Affected By Friday’s IT Crash

by THEFUTURE.TEAM

July 23, 2024

While businesses in the US and Europe awoke on Friday to a global IT meltdown that shut down administrations, airports, and hotels, China entered its weekend largely unaffected.

KEY FACTS

The problem turned out to have come from a software update from Texas-based cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, which generates more than half of its revenue from the United States. The company’s technology is used by many of the world’s largest banks, healthcare and energy companies.
“The impact of Friday’s incident on China was very small, with almost no impact on local public life,” said Gao Feng, senior research director at Gartner. “Only some foreign companies in China were affected.”
“The main reason is that domestic Chinese companies do not use CrowdStrike products, so they are not affected,” Gao said. “CrowdStrike’s customers are mainly concentrated in Europe and the United States.”
Anecdotally, ride-hailing services, e-commerce and other internet-related systems in China were running smoothly on Friday. Chinese state media also said Friday evening that international flights at Beijing’s two airports were operating normally and that Air China, China Eastern Airlines and China Southern Airlines were not affected by large-scale technical system failures.
One of the most notable impacts of the IT outage – including in China – was on Microsoft Windows devices trying to integrate an update to CrowdStrike’s Falcon product, resulting in a blue screen and computer reboot cycle.
Microsoft products are widely used in China, with Windows accounting for about 87 percent of PC shipments on the mainland last year, according to Canalys. This is higher than the share of 79% for the rest of the world in the first quarter of this year.
Microsoft Office 365 products and the Azure cloud service are operated in China by a local company called 21Vianet. It is not yet clear whether localization contributed to the limited impact of Friday’s crash.

WHY AREN’T CHINESE COMPANIES USING CROWDSTRIKE?

In recent years, the US and Chinese governments have forced domestic companies to use proprietary technology and store data locally for national security reasons.

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Canalys pointed out that the Chinese-made UOS, or Unity operating system, has seen growing adoption among state-owned enterprises and government sectors, although Windows still dominates the domestic PC market.

“There is very little impact because CrowdStrike is hardly used in China,” said Rich Bishop, CEO of AppInChina, which publishes international software in China.

“That’s partly because many of the security threats that CrowdStrike is designed to protect against come from China,” he said, adding that Chinese companies typically use products from Tencent, 360 and other businesses.

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Only 1% Of Cyprus Farms Use Precision Farming Technologies

Cyprus remains one of the European Union’s least digitised agricultural economies, with just 1% of farms using precision farming technologies in 2023, according to Eurostat.

The findings come as the EU continues to encourage the adoption of digital tools aimed at improving agricultural productivity, efficiency and sustainability.

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Internet Access Expands, But Digital Uptake Lags

Internet access has improved across the bloc, although adoption remains uneven. Eurostat found that 43% of EU farms had internet access in 2023, with northern and central European countries leading the way.

Denmark, Germany, Slovakia, Latvia, the Czech Republic and Austria all reported internet access rates above 90%.

Greater connectivity, however, has not translated into widespread digital adoption. Farm management information systems, which help farmers manage day-to-day operations, were used by only about 11% of EU farms. France was a notable exception, with around 60% of farms using the technology.

Precision Farming Concentrated In Larger Operations

Robotics adoption also remained relatively limited, with only about 7% of EU farms using robotic technologies. Overall, around 18% of farms with utilised agricultural area employed at least one precision farming technology or practice in 2023.

These included robotics for plant protection, band spraying, variable-rate application, precision crop monitoring and soil analysis. Despite representing fewer than one in five farms, these holdings accounted for around 44% of the EU’s utilised agricultural area.

The figures suggest that precision farming remains concentrated among larger agricultural businesses, where investment in digital technologies is typically easier to support.

Cyprus Lags Behind EU Leaders

Luxembourg, Finland and Estonia recorded the highest shares of utilised agricultural area managed by farms using precision farming technologies, each exceeding 75%.

At the other end of the ranking, Cyprus recorded just 1%, while Greece and Romania reported between 10% and 15%. The results indicate that Cyprus remains at an early stage of digital adoption in agriculture, even as precision farming becomes more widespread across parts of the European Union.