The CEO of Amazon Web Services and the CEO of Super Micro have joined Apple CEO Tim Cook is asking Bloomberg to retract its recent spy chip story.
All three companies were named in a recent Bloomberg Businessweek article claiming that Chinese spy chips had been embedded into hardware supplied by Super Micro. Since the story first broke, Super Micro lost more than half its value in a single day. Unsurprisingly, it’s not happy about it. And clearly neither is Amazon.
@tim_cook is right. Bloomberg story is wrong about Amazon, too. They offered no proof, story kept changing, and showed no interest in our answers unless we could validate their theories. Reporters got played or took liberties. Bloomberg should retract. https://t.co/RZzuUt9fBM
— Andy Jassy (@ajassy) October 22, 2018
“Bloomberg‘s recent story has created unwarranted confusion and concern for our customers, and has caused our customers, and us, harm,” Super Micro CEO Charles Liang said in a statement to CNBC. “Bloomberg should act responsibly and retract its unsupported allegations that malicious hardware components were implanted on our motherboards during the manufacturing process.”
Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy meanwhile tweeted that, “[Tim Cook] is right. Bloomberg story is wrong about Amazon, too. They offered no proof, story kept changing, and showed no interest in our answers unless we could validate their theories. Reporters got played or took liberties. Bloomberg should retract.”
As Jassy mentions, Tim Cook was the first CEO to demand that Bloomberg take back their story. “There is no truth in their story about Apple,” Cook told BuzzFeed News. “They need to do that right thing and retract it.”
Both British and U.S. intelligence agencies have backed up Apple and Amazon, saying they have no reason to doubt the denials being made. Apple additionally wrote a letter to Congress to say as much.
NEW: The CEO of Super Micro joins Apple CEO @tim_cook and Amazon Web Services CEO @ajassy in calling for Businessweek to retract its China chip story pic.twitter.com/dk8VdTtkxG
— Steve Kopack (@SteveKopack) October 22, 2018
The biggest question now is how all of this happened. Bloomberg has stuck by its reporting, which was supposedly the end result of a long investigation into the alleged spy chips. However, with the exception of a statement to say this, and one follow-up story about a “major U.S. telecom” company that discovered compromised Super Micro equipment, it has remained quiet.
At this point, it seemed that the onus is on Bloomberg to come forward with more information from its sources to back up its version of events. In the meantime, Super Micro has said that it plans to carry out a full investigation of its hardware to back up its own innocent claims.
It will be very interesting to follow where this story goes from here.
Via: The Verge
