Nithin Kamath, co-founder of Zerodha, wrote in a post that his brokerage’s stringent IT practices helped it survive the unprecedented global outage that caused total chaos worldwide.

“Almost the entire employee base including non-technical people are using Linux laptops. I am using Zorin (Linux). Kailash Nadh’s (Zerodha CTO) push to avoid all corporate deals saved us yesterday,” Kamath wrote on X.

The global outage, caused by a botched software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Holdings, crashed numerous Microsoft Windows systems, causing widespread disruption. Bankers in Hong Kong, doctors in the U.K. and emergency workers in New Hampshire were among those locked out of critical programs. While Microsoft and CrowdStrike have rolled out fixes, some businesses continue to face disruptions, requiring manual system reboots and file deletions.

In stark contrast, Indian bourses reported minimal impact.

In a joint release on Saturday, the exchanges said: “On July 19, 2024, Indian Exchanges and Clearing Corporations were functioning smoothly despite the global crisis. Out of 1,400+ trading members, only 11 reported disruptions, which were either resolved on the same day or are currently being addressed.”

Alan Woodward, professor of cybersecurity at Surrey University, commented on the severity of the incident: “This is unprecedented. The economic impact will be enormous.”

“By default, nothing is connected to the internet and access is via zero trust networks. Even incoming external email for employees is only available where needed,” Kamath wrote in a post last year, detailing the security measures the brokerage has taken.

Founded by former executives of antivirus pioneer McAfee Inc. and launched in 2012, CrowdStrike has grown to become the leading maker of a relatively new type of security software that is considered one of the best defenses against ransomware and other hacking threats.

It controls about 18% of the $12.6 billion global market for so-called “modern” endpoint protection software. There have been outages before, but none on the scale of CrowdStrike’s, which hit airlines, banks and healthcare systems, and whose effects are still being felt.

In 2017, a series of bugs in Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud service affected the operation of tens of thousands of websites. In 2021, problems at content delivery network Fastly Inc. brought down the websites of several media networks, including Bloomberg News. Outages also took down Amazon’s AWS cloud service. “This is going to be the largest IT outage in history,” said Troy Hunt, an Australian security consultant and creator of the hack-checking website Have I Been Pwned. “We’re just starting to see the tip of the iceberg.”