Who Holds the Kill Switch?

One morning in July, the screens went dark at Nayara Energy, formerly Essar Oil, one of India’s largest private refiners, a company with $15 billion in revenue, 20 million tonnes in annual refining capacity, and a boardroom like any other that used Microsoft Outlook and Teams. The shutdown wasn’t preceded by breach, or a cyberattack, or even the decency of a warning—it was triggered remotely, in a compliance suite somewhere deep inside Microsoft, in response to a European Union sanction against Nayara’s Russian shareholder. No Indian court had passed an order. No local regulator had ruled. And yet the refinery found itself severed from its own infrastructure. The cloud had pulled the plug.

The reflex was geopolitical. Nayara’s co-owner Rosneft (49.13 per cent) had just been added to the EU’s July 18 sanctions list. Microsoft, an American company, interpreted this as cause enough to suspend service to an Indian entity located well outside EU jurisdiction. Contracts had been signed. Data centres provisioned. Payments made. For days, Nayara tried to function without its corporate nervous system, relying on Rediff for internal communications. Tankers were refused at port, emails unretrieved, archival data locked behind firewalls whose keys were held in Redmond.

By the time Microsoft restored access—after Delhi High Court had been approached, and pressure mounted—the message had already radiated out: that in the age of hyperscale, a company can be made to kneel not by embargo or espionage, but by EULA. That the sovereignty of infrastructure is no longer determined by location, but by licensing terms whose logic is owned, updated, and applied by transnational corporations. Nayara, unlike Rosneft, had not been sanctioned by the EU. But it was sanctioned by proximity. The pipeline ran through the cloud, and the cloud now obeyed a map of its own.

This wasn’t the first time corporate muscle folded into geopolitics. In 2021, Amazon Web Services quietly severed ties with Parler. In 2022, Google cut off services to Huawei. That same year, the International Criminal Court found its prosecutor’s email disabled by Microsoft in an American overcompliance spree. These are not decisions taken by courts or diplomats. They are risk calculations made in conference rooms with whiteboards and indemnity clauses. The old Cold War had its spies and cables; the new one has Azure subscriptions.

India, which dreams of digital sovereignty, has yet to look squarely at the weak flank. Its public sector banks still run on imported cloud stacks. Its fintech players are married to SaaS platforms licensed in Delaware. Even the CoWIN vaccination database and the DigiLocker backbone depend on infrastructures that are, in the final accounting, someone else’s. It is not enough to talk about firewalls and backups. The question is simpler and more chilling: who holds the kill switch?

France and the Netherlands are urging governments to leave US-based hyperscalers. Germany is exploring sovereign clouds. In Iran, after sanctions hit Abr Arvan, local engineers scrambled to write a cloud from scratch. India, despite a booming digital economy, has not yet treated the cloud as strategic territory. Nayara is a warning: one doesn’t need to be accused, only entangled.

The silence around the outage was telling. No major public statement from the government. No clarification from Microsoft. The legal ambiguity allows companies to act, and states to disclaim. Meanwhile, refinery throughput dipped. Traders hesitated. Crude vessels turned back. All because one vendor, under one regulatory shadow, decided to switch off the lights in someone else’s house.

For all the talk of data being the new oil, oil now appears to be at the mercy of data. And that inversion has consequences. What the refinery endured wasn’t outage, it was subordination. And it reveals a future in which every enterprise, however grounded in steel and land and barrels per day, must assume that its operational core floats elsewhere, susceptible to decisions made by people whose borders are clauses and whose flags are code. The next time, it could be a port, a stock exchange, a hospital chain.

Delhi High CourtEssar OilMocrosoftNayara Energyprivate refinersRosneft