Why The Company Behind Today's Huge Outage May Be Familiar To F1 Fans

A problematic update pushed out by CrowdStrike led to a major outage across IT that led to canceled flights and systems running into the dreaded blue screen of death. If you happen to be an F1 racing fan, this is a company you might be inadvertently familiar with. CrowdStrike is one of the major sponsors of the Mercedes F1 team, and if you're an avid watcher you may have seen the name displayed on both Lewis Hamilton's racing attire and vehicle — at least until he leaves for Ferrari next year. This partnership was first announced back in 2019, so things were going smoothly up until this point.

Strangely enough, this isn't the first time a Mercedes F1 sponsor has been in hot water. Back in 2022, Mercedes dropped FTX as a sponsor after the cryptocurrency company filed for bankruptcy and was at the center of an investigation by the FTC. Things aren't likely to progress in that manner with CrowdStrike as this seems to be a mistake more than anything, but it shows the Mercedes F1 team has had a string of bad luck with its sponsors. Williams, Aston Martin, and McLaren have not been affected by the outage, so the damage was just limited to Mercedes.

This outage put Mercedes in a rough spot during F1 practice as all of their computers went down, but it's not expected to have a lasting impact. A Mercedes spokesperson confirmed to PlanetF1 there won't be problems on the track as a result of the outage.

"We have been working through the morning with our partners to ensure no impact on track running," the spokesperson told PlanetF1. "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."

While it might not be immediately apparent, computers play a huge role in how F1 operates. Mercedes says each of their F1 cars generates more than 500 GB of data each weekend and between five and 10 TB a week that needs to be transferred. CrowdStrike was brought on as a sponsor as a defense against cyberattacks as the data was transferred over a network. An outage like this means that crucial data can't be transferred, so all of the practice being done on the track is less valuable as there's nothing to analyze.