There’s a global Microsoft outage today that has crippled everything from healthcare, 911 emergency services, and air travel to the laptop your nephew uses to log in to his tech internship remotely. The world of Formula 1 is apparently not immune from this either because Mercedes-AMG F1 found themselves staring at a bunch of Blue Screens of Death ahead of this weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix. However, the team’s tech issues have reportedly since been resolved.
Friday’s mass outage has to do with an update pushed out by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike to Microsoft’s Azure cloud service. CrowdStrike isn’t exactly a household name like Microsoft is, but Formula 1 fans will likely recognize it as one of the more prominent sponsors of Mercedes F1, which makes the snafu’s impact on the team a whole lot less surprising.
Via PlanetF1, a team spokesperson explained, “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.” It should also be noted that Mercedes is reportedly the only team on the grid meaningfully affected by the outage.
As somebody who used to have a whole separate career in IT and had to use Windows against their will, none of this is all that surprising. Microsoft’s systems always gave off the impression that it was all held up by a house of slightly moist, Excel-sheet-based cards—also, have you ever tried to play a quick game on an Xbox after work only to be met with multiple hours’ worth of software updates because you are an adult with responsibilities and haven’t turned it on in a few months? Why were these updates not implemented in the background as I requested? Why do the updates take so dang long? Why is the PlayStation 5 so much better at this?
Anywho, according to the New York Times, a fix for the widespread Microsoft outage has been determined by CrowdStrike but delivering it to users is a whole other can of worms. “…outages would probably take time to resolve because the suggested solution involved rebooting each computer manually into safe mode, deleting a specific file, and then restarting the computer,” cybersecurity consultant Lukasz Olejnik told NYT. “While it is a relatively straightforward process, security experts say, it may not be easy to automate at scale. Those with organized and well-staffed information technology teams could potentially fix the issues more quickly.”
Mercedes F1 has had its share of issues the past few seasons but, at the end of the day, it’s still a world-class organization competing at the highest level of motorsport. If there’s a firm out there that should and would have an “organized and well-staffed tech team that could potentially fix issues more quickly,” it’s them.
The real question, though, is whether or not Williams can still access its big, infamous Excel sheet of parts.
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