After a high-profile investigation by ProPublica, Microsoft officially announced that from now on, Chinese engineers will not participate in technical support of cloud services for the US Department of Defense.
After a high-profile investigation by ProPublica, Microsoft officially announced that from now on, Chinese engineers will not participate in technical support of cloud services for the US Department of Defense.
As TechCrunch reports, Microsoft has changed its policy on servicing government customers after ProPublica discovered that some of the technical tasks supporting the Pentagon’s cloud infrastructure were performed by engineers working from China. Formally, their activities were supervised by «digital supervisors» — American specialists with access to classified information. But, according to journalists, they often did not have the proper technical training to effectively monitor the access and actions of foreign engineers.
The publication caused outrage in the US Department of Defense. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wrote in X:
«Foreign engineers — from any country, including China — should NEVER have access to U.S. Department of Defense systems.»
Microsoft has responded quickly to the pressure. On Friday, the company’s chief communications officer, Frank Shaw, announced that technical support from engineers in China would no longer be used for any U.S. national security customers:
«We have made changes to our work with government customers to ensure that none of our engineering teams in China are providing technical support for the U.S. government cloud or related services.»
Microsoft is a major provider of cloud solutions to the US government, including the military and intelligence agencies. In 2023, the company won a large-scale JEDI Cloud contract worth more than $10 billion. Due to geopolitical tensions between the US and China, the issue of personnel security and the location of engineering teams is becoming critical, especially when it comes to defense orders.
Microsoft also previously suffered a cyberattack on its SharePoint server software, which is used by government agencies and businesses to exchange documents within organizations.
