Zerodha co-founder Nithin Kamath’s in a post said his brokerage’s stringent IT practices helped it survive the unprecedented global outage that left services worldwide in total disarray.
“Almost the entire employee base, including non-technical folks, uses Linux laptops. I use Zorin (Linux). Kailash Nadh’s (Zerodha CTO) push to avoid all enterprise deals saved us yesterday,” Kamath wrote on X.
The global outage, triggered by a botched software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Holdings, crashed countless Microsoft Windows systems, causing widespread disruptions. Bankers in Hong Kong, doctors in the UK, and emergency responders 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 removals.
In stark contrast, Indian exchanges reported minimal impact.
In a combined release on Saturday, the exchanges said: “On July 19, 2024, despite the global crisis, Indian Exchanges and Clearing Corporations operated smoothly. Out of the 1,400+ trading members, only 11 reported disruptions, which were either resolved on the same day or are currently being addressed”.
Alan Woodward, a professor of cybersecurity at Surrey University, commented on the severity of the incident: “This is unprecedented. The economic impact is going to be huge.”
“Nothing is connected to internet by default & access is over zero trust networks. Even incoming external e-mail for employees is only available where necessary,” Kamath had written in post last year, elaborating on the security measures the brokerage has undertaken.
CrowdStrike was founded by former executives of antivirus pioneer McAfee Inc. and launched in 2012. It has grown into the leading maker of a relatively new type of security software that’s considered among 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 that approached the scale of CrowdStrike’s, which hit airlines, banks and health-care systems, and whose repercussions are still being felt.
In 2017, a series of errors within Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud service affected the operation of tens of thousands of websites. In 2021, issues at content delivery network Fastly Inc. took out the websites of several media networks, including Bloomberg News. Disruptions also incapacitated Amazon’s AWS cloud service. “This will 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 really only starting to see the tip of the iceberg.”
