It seems an odd thing to lie about. It's so easy to get caught at it, and they seem to have done it very clumsily. And the upside seems so small -- both for China (if they requested it) and for Microsoft (if they were volunteering).
It does seem like the kind of thing that could happen in error, albeit an error that would probably produce millions of other problems (such as other missing images). Did that happen and none of the others attracted enough attention?
If they said, "Yeah, we patched a bunch of servers, but some data center was temporarily down, they didn't get the patch, and that just happened to be the one having that image," I'd say, "Yeah, that seems reasonable." No idea if it's true, but it sounds enough like other bugs I've committed.
It does seem like the kind of thing that could happen in error, albeit an error that would probably produce millions of other problems (such as other missing images). Did that happen and none of the others attracted enough attention?
If they said, "Yeah, we patched a bunch of servers, but some data center was temporarily down, they didn't get the patch, and that just happened to be the one having that image," I'd say, "Yeah, that seems reasonable." No idea if it's true, but it sounds enough like other bugs I've committed.