Russia Brags Sanctions Helped It Avoid Microsoft Crash

The Russian Digital Communications Ministry bragged on Friday that the worldwide information technology (IT) outage did not affect Russian airlines and banks, thanks to Russia’s countermeasures against Western sanctions.

“At the moment, the ministry has not received reports of system failures at Russian airports,” the ministry claimed. 

“The situation with Microsoft once again shows the importance of import substitution of foreign software, primarily at critical information infrastructure facilities,” the ministry statement asserted.

This was a reference to Russia’s practice of replacing foreign imports with Russian-made alternatives after President Vladimir Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 prompted a wave of Western sanctions. More sanctions were imposed after Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, so the “import substitution” program grew more wide-reaching and more expensive.

Analysts outside the Russian government say import substitution has largely failed because Russia does not produce goods in the quantity and quality needed to make do without foreign products. Replacing food imports with heavily subsidized local agriculture, for example, wound up tripling food prices for Russian consumers.

Bank of Finland Institute for Emerging Economies analyst Heli Simola calculated in June that production costs in several key industries have soared by up to 700 percent over the past two years as Russian manufacturers struggle to make do without foreign imports.

“Russia is especially dependent on technologically sophisticated imports. This makes import substitution even more difficult for the country, given its weak performance in most high-tech sectors and technological innovation development,” Simola noted.

If the claims of the Digital Communications Ministry are correct, Russia separating itself from the worldwide electronic ecosystem for Microsoft Windows might be the first real success for import substitution. On Friday, a faulty software update that cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike pushed out apparently caused thousands of computers worldwide to crash with the dreaded “blue screen of death.” Financial and transportation systems ground to a halt as a result and could take days to resume full operating capacity.

Cybersecurity expert Troy Hunt captured the scope of the problem on Friday by calling it “the largest IT outage in history.”

“This is basically what we were all worried about with Y2K, except it’s actually happened this time,” he said.

Denis Kuskov, director-general of Russia’s TelecomDaily research agency, told the state-run Tass news service on Friday that Russian computers “will not be much affected by this outage because, in most cases, we no longer have a major connection to Microsoft.”

Kuskov and other Russian IT specialists said Russian computers running Windows tend to lag far behind the rest of the world in updates due to sanctions.

“Affected were airlines, railroads, logistics, warehouses, stores, stock exchanges. Everyone using Microsoft. Russia will not be affected because we have been making strenuous efforts to replace their cloud, their software for two years,” said Mobile Research Group analyst Eldar Murtazin.

Murtazin said Chinese computers would probably be unaffected by the global IT outage for similar reasons.

Anton Nemkin of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy said Russian companies should learn the “lesson” that “import substitution definitely benefits those who keep up with it.”