Microsoft outage: Nithin Kamath on how Zerodha managed to stay operational during ’Blue Screen of Death’, ‘We used…’

Co-founder and CEO of Zerodha, Nithin Kamath, said ‘almost the entire employee base uses Linux laptops,’ saved the day, while commenting on the Microsoft Windows outage that wreaked global havoc on July 19.

While the Microsoft outage had disrupted 8.5 million Windows devices, causing ‘blue screen of death’ error, Mac and Linux hosts functioned normally. Earlier, CrowdStrike CEO Kurtz, on X, had further reassured its customers, and stakeholders that Mac and Linux hosts had not been impacted.

In a post on the social media platform X, Zerodha cofounder Nikhil Kamath's sibling, Nithin wrote, “Almost the entire employee base, including non-technical folks, uses Linux laptops. I use Zorin (Linux).”

On Friday, cybersecurity company CrowdStrike’s Falcon Sensor update caused global outages, as several Windows users experienced the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) error, causing systems to restart. ‘Your PC ran into a problem and needs to restart’ message flashed across millions of screens as banks such as J.P Morgan Chase & Co and services across health industries came to a halt.

Nithin Kamath, further elaborated about how the Linux devices saved Zerodha from a potential cyber risk, which could eventually take the form of a financial risk.

“Cyber risk is one of the biggest financial risks. I heard of a single scam of ₹20,000 crores that affected lakhs of Indians,” the cofounder posted on X.

Two-factor authentication (2FA) , an identity and access management security method that requires two forms of identification to access resources and data, could be used as a precautionary measure, said Nithin Kamath.

“A precaution you can take to significantly reduce the odds of being a victim of cyber fraud is to enable two-factor authentication (2FA) everywhere,” added Kamath.

Several users later took to X, to remind the Zerodha co-founder about multiple times in the past when the platform ran into an error.