Jul 252024
I heard a rumor: Russia was significantly less affected by the CrowdStrike cyberoutage. Could it be that they were behind it?
Of course not. Never attribute to evil that which you can explain by stupidity. But in this case, backwardness was also on Russia’s side. You might have seen memes about Southwest Airlines, largely unaffected on account of the fact that many of their systems still run on Windows 3.1. Well, it Russia it’s… like that, even more so. As an example, here’s a CrowdStrike-affected display panel from a few days ago at JFK airport in New York City:
In contrast, here’s a departures board from a small Russian airport:
Kind of hard to hack, that one.
This made my day :) I’d like to add here a picture of recently closed wooden airport https://imgur.com/a/60XOBrb somewhere in depths of Siberia (though I suspect it mainly served helicopters rather than airplanes)
Though besides joke I suspect the reason was far more prosaic – under current circumstances Microsoft is unable to receive payments from official institutions in Russia, hence they shut support, updates etc some time ago and amount of Windows installations there predictably dramatically went down during last two years. This could be indirectly verified by requirements to programmer’s positions at job-sites there – C# and Windows almost disappeared.