Critical situation: An employee works at Toyota's Motomachi factory in Aichi prefecture. Some 25 assembly lines across the company's dozen plants have been halted due to systems glitch. — AFP
TOKYO: Toyota Motor Corp has suspended operations at 12 of 14 plants in Japan due to a systems glitch, though it said it doesn’t suspect it’s the victim of a cyber attack.
Some 25 assembly lines across the dozen plants have been halted, a spokesperson said yesterday. Orders for parts can’t be placed due to a malfunction in the production command system, they said.
“At this point we do not believe a cyber attack is responsible,” the spokesperson said, adding that the glitch currently appears limited to domestic plants.
It’s not yet clear when operations will resume.
Toyota’s Miyata plant in Fukuoka prefecture and the Kyoto operations of subsidiary Daihatsu Motor Co are unaffected.
Toyota shares fell as much as 0.7% in Tokyo trading, reversing an earlier gain.
The world’s biggest carmaker had to shut all 14 of its domestic plants in February 2022 after one of its suppliers was subjected to a ransomware attack. It took several days for operations to recover, and the incident impacted about 5% of Toyota’s output for the month.
In July, a suspected Russian ransomware attack crippled Japan’s biggest port in Nagoya. Toyota, which relies heavily on the port, said shipments were temporarily halted but there was no impact on production.
Toyota produced and sold a record number of vehicles in June as operations continued to recover from a shortage of semiconductors and other parts. — Bloomberg
