Mercedes F1 Sponsor Blunder Leads To Major Global Outage

A cybersecurity oversight from CrowdStrike, a firm which sponsors Mercedes F1, led to a significant worldwide IT disruption.

2023 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, Saturday -Stephen Reuss / Mercedes Press Image

A significant oversight by CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm which sponsors the Mercedes Formula 1 team, has triggered a severe worldwide IT disruption. The incident primarily impacted computers running Windows, resulting in widespread Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) crashes, affecting all sectors from aviation to media, and causing chaos across global infrastructure.

The core of the disruption centered around CrowdStrike’s Falcon Sensor. Described as a robust breach prevention system, a channel file within the update caused unexpected crashes. Airports saw grounded flights, Sky News went off-air, and various transportation networks across the U.S. and U.K. experienced substantial disturbances.

'Brody', director of CrowdStrike Overwatch, clarified on X (formerly Twitter) that the upheaval stemmed from "a faulty channel file, so not quite an update."

There is a faulty channel file, so not quite an update.

There is a workaround...
1. Boot Windows into Safe Mode or WRE.
2. Go to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike
3. Locate and delete file matching "C-00000291*.sys"
4. Boot normally.

1/2

— Brody (@brody_n77) July 19, 2024

Upon recognizing the severity of the issue, CrowdStrike and Microsoft were swift to respond. Microsoft undertook mitigation actions for its cloud services and applications while CrowdStrike engineers worked on rectifying the error. The suggested recovery involves a manual system-by-system intervention, where users need to navigate to their system's directory to remove the problematic file.

However, the scalability of this manual workaround presents massive challenges for large organizations, potentially needing several hours or more to implement.

This outage poses a significant threat to CrowdStrike’s reputation. The urgency for clear and effective communication is paramount to manage the situation and mitigate impacts. The cybersecurity community and concerned users on forums like Reddit are particularly vocal, sharing their frustrations and seeking solutions.

Mercedes and CrowdStrike announced their global partnership in 2019. At this stage, it is not clear as to whether this will impact the Mercedes Formula 1 team during the upcoming Hungarian Grand Prix weekend, which kicks off today with the first two practice sessions at the iconic Hungaroring.