The paper examines the features of online education in the leading universities of the BRICS countries in order to find out to what extent universities were ready for an emergency transition from traditional education to an online format in the context of a pandemic. The goals of online education, the variety of tools and technologies, the possibilities of international cooperation with universities, accessibility/openness for foreign students are assessed. It has been established that the leading universities of the BRICS countries, using digital technologies in education, strive to democratize it, recommend it at the level of the country and the world as a whole, establish close contacts with the national and international academic and scientific communities, and successfully respond to the challenges of reality. In general, the high-ranking universities of the BRICS countries have successfully passed the test of strength, since each of the universities already had a certain set of online education tools, and the pandemic has become a reason for the improvement of technologies and total digitalization of education.