Some factories including at the Fox.

Com plant in Zhengzhou have even seen staff walking out after quarantine measures were introduced.

The factory is an important location for apple which has been producing its latest iphone model there.

Let's get more on this from DW correspondent William Yang in Taipei.

Hi William.

Tell me more about this exodus of Foxconn employees.

What's going on?

So this exodus started a few weeks ago when the plant at Jeonju, which is in central china, started experiencing a spike of their covid cases.

And as we all know, china has been imposing the very strict zero covid strategy since the beginning of the pandemic.

So the plant was actually demanded by the local government to imp post this so called closed loop while they can maintain their production.

But somehow there were a lot of lack of basic resources and food and supplies and the condition uh, did not get under control.

So a lot of the workers finally were not able to live under the circumstances.

And they had this exodus that was seen in video search on chinese social media over the weekend.

And then it sparked the outrage among chinese netizens and the local government had to intervene on sunday.

And so far the government and also the company claimed that they have got the pandemic outbreak under control.

But there was still a lot of discontent among the former workers and also the chinese people.

Okay, so a lot of workers are really fed up here.

But this is also happening at a pretty critical time for Apple because it's preparing to launch its new iphone in the next few months.

How much will this disruption affect production?

So the number is expected to be slashed by as much as 30%, even though Foxconn is trying to shift the production to its hub in Shenzhen.

But we don't know how much that can actually make up for it.

And with the rollout of iPhone 14 expected at the, at the end of the year towards the holiday season, this could eventually and potentially have a lot of impact on the global supply.

Now china seems really determined to hold on to this zero covid strategy.

Um, it certainly seems people are really fed up William Yang, thank you so much for your insights.