In networking, race conditions can take the form of giving multiple users unique privileges in a network. Specifically, say a given server should only have exactly one user with admin privileges. If two users, who are both eligible to become the server admin, request access to those privileges at the same time, then it is possible for both of them to gain that access. This is because, at the point when both of the user requests are received by the server, neither of the users have been granted admin privileges yet, and the server thinks that admin privileges can still be given out.

This form of a race condition is quite common when a network is highly optimized for parallel processing (for example, non-blocking sockets), without a careful consideration of the resources shared across the network.