Many white collar workers employed with foreign companies in China were unable to finish this week's work because their work computers went on strike, showing nothing but the "blue screen of death," an error message found on the Microsoft Windows operating system (OS).

For their employers, it didn't prove to be a good day either, being backstabbed by antivirus software they bought from U.S. developer CrowdStrike.

The impact of this incident extends far beyond China. Many airlines, telecom carriers, banks and other critical infrastructure across the globe are crippled by the latest tech outage, during which some Windows computers "felt blue" and refused to work.

In fact, Chinese people are some of the least affected, as CrowdStrike does not sell its product to Chinese customers, according to Wang Xin, a cybersecurity expert at Chinese software developer Kingsoft Antivirus.

For a quick fix, one can boot the computer into safe mode, delete the malfunctioning CrowdStrike files, which look like "C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike\C-00000291*.sys," and then reboot normally.

One can easily notice from the file path that CrowdStrike's driver is related to the outage. Unlike drivers for hardware like graphics cards and USB devices, antivirus software often plants software drivers into an OS to make sure it won't be bypassed by malware.

Sadly, when the antivirus itself is malfunctioning, there's usually nothing to stop it.

"Antivirus is often users' last resort for cybersecurity. Naturally, users tend to put a lot of trust in it," Wang told CGTN in an exclusive interview.

"But I would recommend diversifying software providers," Wang said, adding that computers running other OSes like macOS or Linux are not likely to be affected by Friday's CrowdStrike incident.

Though not affected this time, computers and smartphones running any OS could be hit by similar incidents, as cloud-based security is common in the cyber world.

"It's also true for cloud services," Wang said. "I found that many Chinese companies are already using more than one cloud service provider, which is a good habit."

China has been striving to achieve supply chain independence. Self-developed software can be a life-saving alternative when giants like Microsoft and CrowdStrike make a mistake.

Wang confirmed to CGTN that if a laptop has more than one OS installed, often called "dual-boot" or "multi-boot," the alternative OSes will still work when Windows is plagued by a driver failure.