On Friday, Russian officials claimed that Moscow’s increased self-sufficiency helped it avoid the global IT systems outage, attributing this resilience to years of adapting under Western sanctions.
However, some experts caution that Russian systems may still be vulnerable.
In response to sanctions related to Russia’s war in Ukraine, Microsoft and other IT firms have halted sales of new products in Russia and reduced their operations.
Notably, CrowdStrike, a U.S. cybersecurity company whose “Falcon Sensor” software caused Microsoft Windows crashes, had no known clients in Russia.
The Russian market is largely served by local cybersecurity companies like Kaspersky Labs.
“CrowdStrike has not provided any services in Russia, since February 2022 for sure,” said Mikhail Klimarev from the non-governmental Internet Protection Society.
Despite the outage impacting international companies, major Russian entities, including the state nuclear giant Rosatom, leading banks, and airlines, reported no disruptions.
The Kremlin emphasized the importance of substituting foreign software, highlighting the country’s growing digital independence.
Russian financial and currency markets continued to operate smoothly.
“Everyone has long been preparing for the possibility of being cut off from Microsoft due to sanctions. The current incident is a test of how well we have prepared.
“So far, everything is fine, at least for the major players, and generally, there is no panic in the market,” said a currency trader, who wished to remain anonymous.
VTB, Russia’s second-largest lender, plans to boost its use of domestically developed software to 95% by year-end, up from the current 85%.
This year alone, the bank invested 50 billion roubles ($571.46 million) in phasing out foreign software.
However, IT expert Eldar Murtazin noted that insufficient testing of new software updates poses risks universally.
“Such issues can happen to any software, whether Russian or non-Russian, if there are no proper controls over new releases.
If such an outage had occurred 3-4 years ago, a number of Russian companies would have been affected,” Murtazin explained.
The situation underscores both the progress Russia has made in software self-sufficiency and the ongoing vulnerabilities that all IT systems face without rigorous testing and controls.