A global IT outage, linked to a CrowdStrike update for Windows, affected entities worldwide but notably left Russia and China largely unscathed due to their self-sufficiency efforts in tech. Russia credited its avoidance of the outage to Western sanctions prompting import substitution, especially in critical infrastructure like airlines and banks. While Russia's cybersecurity is now dominated by local firms like Kaspersky Labs, China's tech self-sufficiency campaign paid off as its key infrastructure remained intact during the Microsoft outage. International businesses and luxury hotels in China were impacted, but its core infrastructure, from airlines to banks, operated normally amidst the global IT disruptions.