There was little impact on Mercedes despite its partner Crowdstrike being at the heart of the global IT outage on Friday.
Computer systems across the world ground to a halt after a software update wreaked havoc.
The outage impacted countless companies including banks, airlines, the United Kingdom’s health service, media outlets, and even the Mercedes F1 team.
“This system was sent an update and that update had a software bug in it and it caused an issue with the Microsoft operating system,” explained Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz in an interview with NBC’s Today show.
“We identified this very quickly and remediated the issue, and as systems come back online, as they’re rebooted, they’re coming up and they’re working and now we are working with each and every customer to make sure we can bring them back online.
“But that was the extent of the issue in terms of a bug that was related to our update.”
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In Hungary, the bug threatened Mercedes with many of its computer systems impacted by the issue.
That included the machines on its pit wall, with images appearing on social media showing the ‘blue screen of death’.
However, Andrew Shovlin moved to clarify the impact of the outage on the team.
“There was a bit of work that we had to do,” said Shovlin, Mercedes’ trackside engineering director.
“We’ve got a lot of computers around the garage and in pit walls and things here, and those all needed updating, but we’ve worked through that.
“The impact in FP1 was minimal, if not nil.
“So, as I said, it created a bit of work, but we’re back where we need to be now.”
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