Friday, 19 July: a global tech outage is causing quite a few problems. Airports, hospitals, et cetera, face major problems. Worldwide? Not quite. In China, in fact, things were steady as a rock.
The reason is obvious: China has plenty of technology, but 99% of it is of its own making. So, if an American company messes up a software update, we are not affected here. So, for once we are the lucky ones. Otherwise – apart from the fact that we have plenty of technology here – the lack of Western technology is quite annoying. We all have some notion of what that looks like: unlike in North Korea, we can listen to K-pop here (if you wanted to), but otherwise common services like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, WhatsApp are not available.
Even something as innocent as an e-reader is kind of worthless here, at least when you want to open a new book without leaving the country first: you simply cannot download any books here. Even when connected to the internet via a VPN, it is impossible to put anything on your e-reader. VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) can be used to access the internet via an IP address from another country, which would allow you to use things like Google. The only problem is that they are banned here. And without a VPN in place, you can trawl the Chinese search engines all you want, but you won't find any download links to any VPNs, making this a bit of a chicken-and-egg story.
