MOSCOW: Russia’s Digital Communications Ministry announced Friday that airlines and banks in the country have not been affected by a widespread Microsoft outage disrupting flights and businesses globally.
The ministry highlighted Moscow’s measures against Western sanctions as a shield from the digital turmoil.
The international travel industry, along with some television broadcasters, banks, and healthcare systems, experienced outages in the United States, Australia, Europe, and Asia on Friday morning.
The Australian government attributed the outages to the global cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike, which, according to Reuters, had alerted its clients that its software was causing Microsoft Windows to crash.
Microsoft stated it was taking “mitigation actions” to address the service issues, though it was not immediately clear if these were connected to the global outages.
“At the moment, the ministry has not received reports of system failures at Russian airports,” Russia’s Digital Communications Ministry said in a statement circulated by the state-run news agency TASS.
Russia’s federal aviation authority, Rosaviatsia, confirmed that no domestic airline has been impacted by the global outage.
“The situation with Microsoft once again shows the importance of import substitution of foreign software, primarily at critical information infrastructure facilities,” the Digital Communications Ministry added.
Russia has focused on substituting imports of foreign goods in key sectors since 2014, when relations with the West began to deteriorate over the annexation of Crimea and support of separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Microsoft announced it would suspend new sales and scale down operations in Russia soon after the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
