Microsoft Chairman and Chief Government Officer Satya Nadella (L) returns to the stage after a pre-recorded interview through the Microsoft Construct convention opening keynote in Seattle, Washington on Might 19, 2025.
Jason Redmond | AFP | Getty Photographs
Microsoft on Friday revised its practices to make sure that engineers in China now not present technical help to U.S. protection purchasers utilizing the corporate’s cloud providers.
The corporate applied the modifications in an effort to cut back nationwide safety and cybersecurity dangers stemming from its cloud work with a significant buyer. The announcement got here days after ProPublica revealed an intensive report describing the Protection Division’s dependence on Microsoft software program engineers in China.
“In response to considerations raised earlier this week about US-supervised international engineers, Microsoft has made modifications to our help for US Authorities prospects to guarantee that no China-based engineering groups are offering technical help for DoD Authorities cloud and associated providers,” Frank Shaw, the Microsoft’s chief communications officer, wrote in a Friday X submit.
The change impacts the work of Microsoft’s Azure cloud providers division, which analysts estimate now generates greater than 25% of the corporate’s income. That makes Azure larger than Google Cloud however smaller than Amazon Net Providers. Microsoft receives “substantial income from authorities contracts,” based on its most up-to-date quarterly earnings assertion, and greater than half of the corporate’s $70 billion in first-quarter income got here from prospects primarily based within the U.S.
In 2019, Microsoft received a $10 billion cloud-related protection contract, however the Pentagon wound up canceling it in 2021 after a authorized battle. In 2022, the division gave cloud contracts value as much as $9 billion in complete to Amazon, Google, Oracle and Microsoft.
ProPublica reported that the work of Microsoft’s Chinese language Azure engineers is overseen by “digital escorts” within the U.S., who usually have much less technical prowess than the workers they handle abroad. The report detailed how the “digital escort” association would possibly go away the U.S. weak to a cyberattack from China.
“That is clearly unacceptable, particularly in in the present day’s digital menace setting,” Protection Secretary Pete Hegseth stated in a video posted to X on Friday. He described the structure as “a legacy system created over a decade in the past, through the Obama administration.” The Protection Division will evaluate its methods in seek for related exercise, Hegseth stated.
Microsoft initially informed ProPublica that its workers and contractors had been adhering to U.S. authorities guidelines.
“We stay dedicated to offering probably the most safe providers potential to the US authorities, together with working with our nationwide safety companions to guage and regulate our safety protocols as wanted,” Shaw wrote.
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