Microsoft 365 stalled in 74 countries, then how did China survive? Which digital armor is the dragon wearing?

New Delhi. Microsoft 365 services suddenly stopped yesterday i.e. Friday. When Outlook, Teams and Co-Pilot stopped working, there was chaos everywhere. Flights were canceled in many countries and people could not send messages and meetings. But, amidst this digital earthquake, there was one country on which the impact of Microsoft outage was negligible. That country is our neighbor China. In such a situation, everyone wants to know what ‘digital cover’ China is wearing, which saves it from such global shocks every time.

The Microsoft outage had little impact on China because it adopts three special strategies, due to which technological shocks from the outside world do not penetrate within its borders. Was not allowed to enter within its limits. According to Al Jazeera and international media reports, China’s separate cloud infrastructure, domestic software ecosystem and strict data retention rules help protect parts of its digital networks from disruptions by global technology platforms.

Cloud system separate from global network

Unlike the rest of the world, Microsoft does not directly operate its Microsoft 365 service in China. Instead, the company has given its license to local partner 21Vianet, which runs its own separate cloud infrastructure within China. Since China’s network is not dependent on Microsoft’s global control plane in which the technical glitch occurred, the impact of the glitch in the international network did not reach China’s local system.

rely on homegrown software

China’s government agencies and big companies have been trying to reduce their dependence on Western technology for the last several years. Today, most of the offices in China use domestic software like WPS Office, DingTalk, WeCom and Fishoo instead of Microsoft for daily work, documents and meetings. When there is no dependency, the impact of Microsoft being down was negligible on Chinese institutions.

It is mandatory to keep the data within the country

China’s data governance framework is very strict. Under the rules there, it is mandatory for storage, processing and transfer of sensitive data to take place within the country’s borders. Permission to send data across borders is not easily obtained. This strictness has created an independent digital infrastructure within China, which remains largely safe from the disturbances of the global Internet.

Outage shows how important digital sovereignty is

This incident has once again sparked a global debate on data sovereignty. Tech experts believe that excessive dependence on a few big cloud companies creates the risk of Single Point of Failure. That means if there is a fault at one place then everything stops.