We assess the impact of the pandemic and the ensuing disruptions to global value chains (GVCs) on exporting firms. We find that firms’ participation in GVCs increased their vulnerability to the pandemic shock, in terms of export sales and probability of survival. Firms further downstream in GVCs were more severely affected by supply disruptions. At the same time, our results suggest that exporting firms benefited from sourcing their core inputs from different countries, supporting the hypothesis that diversification in global value chains fosters supply chain resilience.