F1 News: Global IT outage affected Mercedes at Hungary GP

(GMM) The Mercedes F1 team was affected by the world’s biggest ever IT outage that swept the globe on Friday.

The Formula 1 team is actually sponsored by cyber-security company Crowdstrike, whose bug within a software update crashed Microsoft operating systems across the world.

The dreaded ‘blue screen of death’ was seen in the Mercedes garage and pit wall ahead of Friday practice at the Hungarian GP.

“We are working closely with our partners at CrowdStrike to minimize the impact,” a spokesperson for the team told Bild newspaper from Budapest.

Mercedes Team engineering boss Andrew Shovlin said after practice: “There was a bit of work that we had to do.

“We’ve got a lot of computers around the garage and the pit wall and those all needed updating, but we’ve worked through that,” he added.

“The impact in FP1 was minimal, if not nil.”