News Microsoft to stop using engineers in China to work on U.S. Defense computer systems in wake of investigative report — fears of exploitation by fore...

Why were they allowed to do it in the first place?

Yep. Letting foreign engineers work on military systems doesn't quite pass the common sense test, does it? But we have even found North Koreans working on US projects before. As well as other US adversaries. With spycraft being so bad these days, why tempt fate by making it easy to bring the spies right into the middle of military projects?
 
When Capitalist values don't align with Patriotism.

Also, big facepalm to the DOD for not even checking or putting it as a requirement in the contracts.
This right here is exactly what it is. You can expect any company to do whatever is easiest and cheapest. The contracting clearly didn't take into account the possibility of the people on premises not being the only ones in the chain.
 
  • Like
Reactions: blppt
It would be interesting to know what work these people did. From what I could understand from the articles, these were technical support engineers dealing with Microsoft cloud machines that the DoD used. This could be something quite limited in scope, and it's not clear from the articles.