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

BEIJING — 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.

One of the most notable impacts of the IT outage — including in China — was on Microsoft Windows devices attempting to integrate an update of CrowdStrike’s Falcon product, resulting in a blue screen and a cycle of computer restarts.

Microsoft products are widely used in China — Windows had about 87% of personal computer shipments in the mainland last year, according to Canalys. That’s higher than the 79% share for the rest of the world in the first quarter of this year, the research firm said.

A hashtag “Thank you Microsoft, [I can] take off early” ranked second on Chinese social media platform Weibo when the outages began to escalate early Friday afternoon local time. Posts generally showed photos of the “blue screen of death” or discussed the global outage.

But the hashtag’s popularity soon gave way to others about domestic matters, including Chinese smartphone company Xiaomi’s product launch in Beijing that evening.

Microsoft products Office 365 and Azure cloud are operated in China by a local company called 21Vianet. It was not immediately clear whether localization contributed to the limited impact on Friday. The two companies did not immediately respond to CNBC requests for comment.

The U.S. and Chinese governments have in recent years pushed domestic companies to use homegrown technology and store data locally out of national security concerns.

Canalys pointed out that China-made UOS, or Unity Operating System, has growing adoption among state-owned enterprises and government sectors, although Windows still dominates the domestic personal computer market.

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

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

CrowdStrike said in its latest annual cyber threat report that last year, “China-nexus adversaries continued to operate at an unmatched pace across the global landscape, leveraging stealth and scale to collect targeted group surveillance data, strategic intelligence and intellectual property.”

— CNBC’s Ryan Browne contributed to this report.