IT outage causes F1 chaos as Sky Sports issue apology and Mercedes made to suffer | F1 | Sport

The Hungarian Grand Prix was affected by the global IT outage on Friday with Sky Sports F1 and Mercedes among the parties impacted by the CrowdStrike issues.

Global outages, triggered by a content update ‘defect’ at CrowdStrike, have wreaked havoc across the globe with public services, banks, and air and rail travel all affected. The world of F1 was not spared from the inconvenience either.

Mercedes reported outages at the Hungaroring ahead of FP1. Engineers were spotted staring at malfunctioning screens on the pit wall, and engineers were forced to manually tend to all computers in the garage.

Addressing the impact that the outage was having on the team, a Mercedes spokesperson stated: “We are working closely with our partners at CrowdStrike to mitigate any impact.”

The Silver Arrows were not the only team affected by the IT outage. Mercedes‘ customer teams – McLaren, Aston Martin and Williams – were also hindered by the CrowdStrike mayhem.

Viewers were also affected. During Sky Sports F1’s broadcast of the first free practice session, Rachel Brookes was forced to apologise as driver on-board footage was unavailable due to IT issues.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz delivered a statement on Friday touching on the issues. “CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” he said.

“Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.

“We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website. We further recommend organisations ensure they’re communicating with CrowdStrike representatives through official channels.”