Who Holds the Kill Switch? | OPEN Magazine Special

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.

Disclaimer: Excerpt from “Who Holds the Kill Switch?” published on July 30, 2025 in OPEN Magazine.

Read the full article here: https://openthemagazine.com/feature/who-holds-the-kill-switch/