The Formula 1 team Mercedes commented on the global computer breakdown and stated that they have resumed “normal” activity after overcoming this issue caused by a faulty update of the antivirus software from CrowdStrike, its sponsor and IT partner. The incident, which affected many companies worldwide, required significant technical interventions to be resolved by the IT team.
Friday morning, a cybersecurity software update from CrowdStrike caused major malfunctions on Microsoft Windows machines worldwide. This bug resulted in blue screens on affected devices, impacting various sectors such as banks, airlines, and television companies, whose systems were temporarily paralyzed.
Mercedes is sponsored by CrowdStrike and uses Microsoft Windows. The solution to solve this problem was to roll back to the previous version of the software on each affected machine. Although the task was easy to perform, it turned out to be very time-consuming. The team that discovered the issue at the factory on Friday morning had to work on it throughout the morning and was able to restore its normal operation just before Free Practice 1.
At the time the tests started at 1:30 p.m. local time, all machines had been repaired and there was no impact on the session. Andrew Shovlin, technical director of Mercedes, confirmed in a press conference that the impact of this issue on their on-track activities had been almost zero and that everything was in order for the rest of the weekend. “We received excellent support from them and all our partners,” he said. “There was some work to be done. We have a lot of computers in the garage and on the pit walls, and they all needed to be updated. But we overcame that. The impact on the first test session was minimal, if not zero. It created some work, but we are back to where we need to be now.”
Teams all use digital and computer solutions to communicate and retrieve telemetry information. It is therefore essential, during a testing session, to have these elements available to start.
McLaren was also affected by the famous Windows blue screen. Alpine, which is also sponsored by Microsoft, may have been affected as well, as well as other teams. However, Williams has confirmed not to have been impacted.
