MOSCOW, July 19. /TASS/. The global outage of the Windows operating system that hobbled companies around the world will probably not hammer the Russian corporate world too much following a drive to switch to alternatives to Microsoft products over the past couple years, several analysts told TASS.

"I think that Russian companies will not be much affected by this outage because, in most cases, we no longer have a major connection to Microsoft," said Denis Kuskov, director general of the TelecomDaily research agency.

He said many computers in Russia are still running on Windows, but it is unclear what updates they installed.

The leading analyst of Mobile Research Group, Eldar Murtazin, said he believes that the outage occurred in the cloud product Microsoft Azure. He said this is the first-ever outage of this magnitude.

"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," Murtazin said.

The analyst said China was not affected by the outage.

Alexey Slukin, the editor-in-chief of a Telegram channel called Telekommunalka, said the outage could have been caused by an update to the Crowdstrike antivirus, which caused the operating system to malfunction massively, and even brought up the dreaded "blue screen of death" messages. In parallel, according to the analyst, problems were recorded with Microsoft's cloud services, specifically their Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Cloud platforms, as well as various other services, such as the Microsoft 360 cloud office service.

"At this time, there have been problems with the services, while cloud platforms have started to recover. In Russia, Microsoft imposed restrictions on its cloud products, but a large number of companies continue to use Azure and MS Cloud. They could have encountered problems amid the global outage," Slukin said.

The Autonomous Nonprofit Organization Digital Economy also said the outage will not affect Russian companies because it occurred within the corporate service Crowdstrike, which is unlikely to be used in Russia now, sales to the country were stopped about two or three years ago, and it is embedded only in specialized versions of Windows, which are also not available on the Russian market.

Anton Nemkin, a member of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, Information Technology and Communications, said the outage will show what Russian companies are reluctant to switch to Russian solutions.

"For them, I think, it will be a lesson. Import substitution definitely benefits those who keep up with it," the lawmaker said.

Windows outage

The widespread outage of the Windows operating system has disrupted the work of companies in the banking, aviation, media and some other industries. Some banks and companies in the US, Australia, India, the UK and the EU have reported disruptions. The outage affected such airlines as Lufthansa, Air France and KLM.

The massive outage was caused by a critical error, known as the "blue screen of death," which came up as devices running the Windows operating system were started up, the Verge reported. According to the report, the problem could have been caused by the latest update to Crowdstrike’s security software. Devices and servers, where it is installed, disconnect from the network and go into an endless reboot cycle, the Verge reported.