MOSCOW, July 19. /TASS/. The problems that emerged following a glitch in the operations of Microsoft services may affect some of Russia’s corporate sector, but the IT failure will not impact the country’s critical infrastructure, Valentin Klimov, deputy director of the Institute of Intellectual Cybernetic Systems of the National Research Nuclear University MEPHI told TASS.

"Russia’s corporate sector may be affected by this problem, but critical infrastructures, including Rosatom, Roscosmos, and other important segments, run on Linux, Astra Linux, or Aurora, which means they are not impacted by such failure," Klimov assured.

The expert stressed that Russia started planning for these contingencies a long time ago. "As long as 7-8 years ago, even earlier, in 2014, they began to threaten us and basically said that they will cut off computer infrastructure. And Russia very wisely started to think about import substitution in several key infrastructures. Now one can say that the problem [of the outage aftermath] also exists for us but not on the scale they are seeing in the West. We have replaced many programs, including operating systems, there are alternative OS which can be quickly switched to and, accordingly, are not affected by this problem at all," Klimov noted.

On Friday, several countries began reporting mass outages of Windows-based computer devices. Leading international banks, air carriers, media outlets and companies in other sectors reported problems with their operations. US-based CrowdStrike cybersecurity provider confirmed to CNBC the connection between its recent antivirus update and the massive failures in the Windows operating system. The company added that its specialists were working on restoring the program to its previous version.