Russia’s Ministry of Digital Communications said on Friday: Thanks to Russia’s resistance to Western sanctions, the global IT outage did not affect Russian airlines or banks.
“At present, we have not received any reports of system failures at Russian airports,” the ministry said. Claimed.
“The Microsoft situation reaffirms the importance of import substitution of foreign software, primarily in critical information infrastructure facilities,” the ministry statement said.
This refers to Russia’s practice of replacing foreign imports with Russian-made alternatives after President Vladimir Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, which led to a wave of Western sanctions. Further sanctions were imposed after Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, and the “import substitution” program became more widespread and more expensive.
Analysts outside the Russian government say import substitution For the most part We’re screwed This is because Russia does not produce the necessary quantities and quality of goods to survive without foreign products. For example, replacing food imports with heavily subsidized local agriculture has tripled food prices for Russian consumers.
Heri Simola, Analyst, Institute for Emerging Economies, Bank of Finland calculated It was reported in June that production costs in some key industries have risen by up to 700 percent over the past two years as Russian manufacturers struggle to make ends meet without foreign imports.
“Russia is particularly dependent on technologically advanced imports. Import substitution is even more difficult for the country given the low performance in most high-tech sectors and innovation development,” Simola noted.
If the Digital Ministry’s claims are correct, Russia’s departure from the Microsoft Windows global electronics ecosystem could be the first real success story of import substitution. On Friday, a flawed software update released by cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike Apparently Thousands of computers around the world crashed, displaying the dreaded “Blue Screen of Death,” resulting in financial and transportation systems halting and potentially taking days to restore full operational capacity.
Cybersecurity expert Troy Hunt captured the scope of the problem on Friday. call that “The biggest IT outage in history”
“This is basically what we all worried about during Y2K, but this time it actually happened,” he said.
Denis Kuskov, director of the Russian research agency Telekom Daily, said: Said The state-run TASS news agency reported on Friday that Russian computers “for the most part no longer have a major connection to Microsoft and therefore will not be significantly affected by the outage.”
Kuskov and other Russian IT experts said sanctions mean that Windows computers in Russia tend to be significantly slower to update than those in the rest of the world.
“It affects airlines, railways, logistics, warehouses, stores, stock exchanges — they all use Microsoft. Russia will not be affected because we have been working hard for two years to replace the Russian cloud, our software,” said Eldar Murtazin, an analyst at Mobile Research Group.
Murtazin said that for similar reasons, Chinese computers would likely be unaffected by a global IT outage.
Anton Nemkin, from the Russian State Duma’s Information Policy Committee, said Russian companies should learn the “lesson” that “import substitution definitely benefits those who catch up.”
