Microsoft shuts down Nayara, Trump tariffs show need for India's tech resilience

Hindustan Times

17 hours ago

On July 18, Microsoft pulled the plug on Nayara Energy, one of India's largest oil companies. There was no warning, no explanations. Neither was there any legal order from any Indian authority. It was a decision made in some boardroom halfway across the world, and with that the company lost access to Teams, email, documents and records. Microsoft pulled the plug on Nayara Energy, one of India's largest oil companies, on July 18. (REUTERS)
On July 30, the US President Donald Trump announced sweeping 25 percent tariffs on Indian exports. Shrimp, auto parts, solar panels, pharmaceutical ingredients. The reason cited for these tariffs that came into immediate effect was India's oil and defence dealings with Russia.
At first glance, these two incidents look disconnected, but they are not. They are both flickers of the same voltage. India is rising fast, yes, but it is rising on platforms, contracts, and markets it does not control. And when the world decides to switch things off, we find out how few levers we actually hold.
Most mornings, everything just works. The laptop boots up. The inbox fills in. Files open. Meetings start. Presentations load. A thousand digital threads hold together a modern working day. We don't think of them as systems. We think of them as the norm. Like running water. Until one day, you turn the tap on and nothing flows from it.
That is what happened to Nayara. Once known as Essar Oil, it was bought in 2017 by a consortium led by Rosneft, Russia's state-owned oil giant. At the time, it was one of the biggest foreign investments into India. Then came July 2025 when the European Union quietly updated its sanctions list. Rosneft was still on it. Microsoft's compliance team noticed and flipped the switch. Nayara's staff were locked out. No emails. No meetings. No documents. Just silence.
Also Read: Gujarat refinery hit by EU's new Russia sanctions; India says double standards
In panic, they reached out, not to Microsoft but to Rediff. Yes, that Rediff. The one we had all written off. The dotcom veteran still quietly hosts enterprise email, in India, under Indian law. No foreign entanglements. No one in Brussels or Redmond to report to. When global infrastructure failed, Rediff became the lifeboat.
Nayara went to court. Filed a case in Delhi and claimed there was no violation of Indian law or American law. Microsoft had acted on its own, they said, without cause. By July 30, a day before the hearing, Microsoft quietly restored all services. Nayara withdrew the case. That short sequence tells us everything. The shutdown was fast. The restoration came only when challenged. Microsoft reinstated access, but said little about what changed. It had nothing to do with contracts and everything to do with risk.
Trump's tariff announcement came the same day Microsoft reversed course. One switch turned off a company, another slapped an economy. Neither came from India but both disrupted systems here. Our tech. Our trade. Our supply chains. Our ambitions.
We like to believe that we are in control but when your infrastructure depends on terms written in other jurisdictions, the illusion of control fades quickly. Our licenses are paid for but our access is rented. We use the best tools the world has built. Microsoft, Google, AWS... They are reliable until they are not.
Also Read: Donald Trump announces 25% tariff, plus a penalty on India from Aug 1
When they fail, the question becomes painfully simple. What else do we have? That is when Rediff starts to look like foresight and Zoho too. Built in India. Hosted in India. Bound by Indian law. It doesn't matter that they don't dominate headlines. What matters is that when the world decides to pull the plug, they still work.
I spoke with Sanjay Anandaram, a longtime entrepreneur and volunteer at iSPIRT. One thing he said stuck with me. The balance of power, he said, is not in our favour. Countries like the United States and the European Union don't just have laws, they have the institutions to enforce them. These are institutional sticks. In other words, rules with teeth and reach. Our systems are still catching up with the twentieth century, never mind the twenty-first. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act is a good start but rules are only one part of it. We need mechanisms and we need enforcement. We need what he calls techno-legal methods. That's how sovereignty is built.
Also Read: Full list: Donald Trump announces US tariffs on India, other trading partners
This is not about tech-nationalism, it is not about refusing foreign platforms rather it is about resilience. It is about knowing that if someone else holds the switch, they might one day decide to use it.
The week that just passed showed us what that looks like. Sovereignty no longer hangs from flagpoles, it lives in contracts, in code, in access, and in who holds the right to cut the power.
Charles Assisi is co-founder of Founding Fuel. He can be reached on [e-mail]