MOSCOW, July 19 (Reuters) - Russian officials boasted on

Friday that Moscow was spared the impact of the global IT

systems outage because of its increased self-sufficiency after

years of Western sanctions, though some experts said Russian

systems could still be vulnerable.

Microsoft ( MSFT ) and other IT firms have suspended sales of new

products in Russia and have been scaling down their operations

in line with sanctions imposed over Russia's war in Ukraine,

which Moscow describes as a special military operation.

CrowdStrike ( CRWD ), a U.S. cybersecurity company whose widely used

"Falcon Sensor" software caused Microsoft Windows to crash, had

no known customers in Russia. The Russian market is dominated by

local cybersecurity firms such as Kaspersky Labs.

"CrowdStrike ( CRWD ) has not provided any services in Russia, since

February 2022 for sure," Mikhail Klimarev from the

non-governmental Internet Protection Society told Reuters.

The Kremlin, along with companies from state nuclear giant

Rosatom, which operates all of Russia's nuclear plants, to major

lenders and airlines, reported no glitches amid the outage that

affected international companies across the globe.

"The situation once again highlights the significance of

foreign software substitution," Russia's digital development

ministry said.

Russian financial and currency markets also ran smoothly.

"Everyone has long been preparing for the possibility of

being cut off from Microsoft ( MSFT ) due to sanctions. The current

incident is a test of how well we have prepared. So far,

everything is fine, at least for the major players, and

generally, there is no panic in the market," one currency

trader, who wished to remain anonymous, told Reuters.

Russia's second-largest lender, VTB, announced plans to

increase the share of domestically developed software to 95% by

the end of this year, up from 85% currently. The bank said it

invested 50 billion roubles ($571.46 million) this year alone in

phasing out foreign software.

However, IT expert Eldar Murtazin said the risks posed by

insufficient testing of new software updates were universal, and

Russian software was not necessarily immune to future glitches

like the one that hit CrowdStrike ( CRWD ).

"Such issues can happen to any software, whether Russian or

non-Russian, if there are no proper controls over new releases.

If such an outage had occurred 3-4 years ago, a number of

Russian companies would have been affected," Murtazin told

Reuters.

($1 = 87.4955 roubles)