Mercedes overcome disruption following CrowdStrike systems outage

Lewis Hamilton leads George Russell down the pit lane

Mercedes is “confident” a global computer systems outage triggered by a team partner won’t affect on-track running at the Hungaroring.

On Friday morning, a cyber security company and Mercedes partner CrowdStrike triggered a global computer systems outage that is causing issues for industries such as banking, airline and transport, and even news and media.

Mercedes confident CrowdStrike issues won’t affect Hungarian GP

The issue has been caused by a defect in a “single content update for Windows hosts”, explained CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz on Friday morning.

“Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted,” Kurtz said. “The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”

CrowdStrike will provide “complete and continuous updates” on its website, Kurtz explained, referring customers to the “support portal for the latest updates”.

The issues triggered by the outage resulted in some disruption to Mercedes’ preparations in the garage ahead of the Hungarian Grand Prix, but the Brackley-based squad was confident the issues won’t affect any on-track running.

A spokesperson for the Mercedes team confirmed: “We have been working through the morning with our partners to ensure no impact on track running.

“It has required some fixes to be applied but that’s all proceeding smoothly.”

The exact nature of the effect of the CrowdStrike outage on the team isn’t yet clear, with efforts concentrating on rectifying the systems ahead of the practice day beginning at 1:30pm local time.

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Mercedes customer teams Williams, Aston Martin, and McLaren are understood to not be affected by the outages, while Alpine, Ferrari, VCARB, Red Bull, Sauber, and Haas have also been largely unaffected by the issues.

F1 teams and their computer systems go hand in hand in the modern day, with real-time data analysis and cyber security just as crucial to competitive running as sockets and spanners.

The communication links between the F1 teams at the track and their simulation and monitoring suites at their factories are also critical to the smooth execution of a Grand Prix weekend, with the reliability of these links potentially making the difference between a win and a second place.

System failures of a significant magnitude are rare in F1, with a recent example being an outage during FP1 for the 2021 Emilia Romagna Grand Prix that left those on the pit wall unable to monitor times.

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