Russia thanks Western sanctions for helping it avoid the CrowdStrike IT outage

• An IT outage linked to a CrowdStrike update hit computer systems around the world on Friday.
• Russia remained unaffected, however, crediting import substitution and sanctions resilience.

A huge IT outage linked to an update for Windows issued by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike disrupted computer systems across the globe on Friday.

Airlines, banks, supermarkets, media outlets, and more were affected by the outage, which experts say was one of the largest in history.

While the issue caused hundreds of thousands of Microsoft Windows computers to crash, one country was unaffected: Russia.

Russia's Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media said Friday that airlines and banks in the country had shown no signs of being impacted by the outage.

The Ministry boasted that Moscow's measures against Western sanctions had saved it from the digital breakdown.

"The situation with Microsoft once again shows the importance of import substitution of foreign software, primarily at critical information infrastructure facilities," the Ministry said.

Russia's federal aviation authority, Rosaviatsia, also confirmed that no domestic airline had been affected by the outage.

The Kremlin said that its computer systems were working "seamlessly" and had not been impacted.

Mikhail Klimarev from the non-governmental Internet Protection Society told Reuters that "CrowdStrike has not provided any services in Russia, since February 2022 for sure."

Russia has worked to substitute imports of foreign goods in key sectors since relations with the West began deteriorating during the 2014 annexation of Crimea and war in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region.

After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Microsoft and other tech firms suspended new sales in Russia and wound down their operations to comply with Western sanctions.

The Russian cybersecurity market is now dominated by local firms like Kaspersky Labs, per Reuters.

Kaspersky Labs told BBC News earlier this week that it was exiting the US after sales and distribution of its software were banned by the Biden administration.

It came after Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said that the Kremlin's influence over the company represented a significant security risk.

Russian financial markets also seemingly ran without problems on Friday.

One unnamed currency trader told Reuters: "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," they said.

But IT expert Eldar Murtazin noted that "such issues can happen to any software, whether Russian or non-Russian," if the right controls aren't in place.