5 Companies That Had A Rough Week

For the week ending June 21, CRN looks at IT companies that were unfortunate, unsuccessful or just didn't make good decisions.

The Week Ending June 21

Topping this week's roundup of those having a rough week is Huawei, which could lose as much as $30 billion in sales over the next two years because of U.S. blacklisting.

Also making the "Rough Week" list are chipmakers Intel, AMD and Nvidia for a new U.S. government ban on sales to Chinese HPC system developers. Google made the list because of a system outage for its Google Calendar service. Master MSP IT By Design wrestled to contain a ransomware attack while Oracle scrambled to fix a critical vulnerability in a key middleware product.

Not everyone in the IT industry was having a rough go of it this week. For a rundown of companies that made smart decisions, executed savvy strategic moves – or just had good luck – check out this week's Five Companies That Came To Win roundup.

U.S. Blacklisting Could Cost Huawei $30B Over Two Years

The U.S. government's move to prevent Chinese networking and mobile device giant Huawei from acquiring American-made technology will cause the company's revenue to decline in 2019 with a total expected impact of as much as $30 billion over two years, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei said this week.

Ren's comments came during an event at Huawei's headquarters in Shenhen and were reported by the Wall Street Journal and other media outlets.

Huawei's revenue will drop to about $100 billion this year compared to $107 billion last year, Ren said, and the company will forfeit about $30 billion in overall revenue opportunity over the next two years.

Just last week a Huawei executive said the company is delaying the launch of a new MateBook laptop because the company cannot obtain Intel processors and Microsoft's Windows operating system. The company also has delayed the launch of a new Mate X foldable smartphone.

U.S. Cuts Off Intel, AMD And Nvidia From Selling To Chinese HPC Vendors

Speaking of U.S.-China trade tensions, Intel, AMD and Nvidia found themselves caught in the crossfire this week when the U.S. government said it is prohibiting five Chinese high-performance computer makers from purchasing U.S. technology – including components made by those leading chipmakers.

The news, announced by the U.S. Department of Commerce, is designed to curtail China's development of exascale supercomputers by the five Chinese HPC companies, some of which the U.S. says have ties to the Chinese military.

One HPC systems builder told CRN that China is a major buyer of supercomputer components and the U.S. government move puts Intel, AMD and Nvidia "in a bit of a dicey position."

Google Calendar Outage Another Blow To Google, G Suite Users

Service disruptions hit Google Calendar and Google Hangouts Meet this week, dealing another blow to Google, its partners and users who have had to deal with multiple G Suite service disruptions in recent months.

Google Calendar went down around 10:00 a.m. ET Tuesday and service was restored for all users after 1:00 p.m., more than three hours later. No explanation for the outage has been given.

This week's service interruption comes a little more than two weeks after a major failure of the Google Cloud platform on June 2 that lasted nearly four hours. That outage was later blamed on a botched system configuration change.

IT By Design Hit By Ransomware Attack

Master MSP IT By Design worked to contain a ransomware attack that compromised its systems and spread to eight companies earlier this week.

IT By Design said it was able to contain the attack, which struck on Tuesday, within 48 hours, but not before the eight clients were impacted. On Thursday the company said that 96 percent of affected systems were restored and clients were operational with minimal to no data loss. The company said it did not pay a ransom to restore its systems.

The security incident comes as attacks on MSPs and software service providers are on the rise. Last year the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warned that advanced persistent threat actors were on the move against MSPs.

Oracle Issues Emergency Patch For WebLogic Vulnerability

Mozilla wasn't the only organization rushing this week to fix a critical software bug that attackers had begun to exploit. Oracle likewise had to scramble to issue a patch for a zero-day vulnerability in the vendor's WebLogic application server – a major component of Oracle's Fusion Middleware lineup.

Oracle issued a security alert for the remote code execution bug, which reports said were already being exploited in the wild. The bug was first reported over the weekend by Knownsec, a security firm in China.

The vulnerability, which received a severity score of 9.8 out of 10, allows an attacker to run malicious code on the WebLogic server without authentication

This latest incident comes less than two months after Oracle issued a patch in April to fix another WebLogic security flaw.