The Japanese car giant Toyota announced on Monday that it will suspend production at its 14 factories in Japan on Tuesday due to a “system failure” at a local supplier, which would have been caused by a cyber attack.
No information was immediately available on who was behind the attack or the motive. The incident comes just after Japan joined Western allies in clamping down on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, though it was unclear if the hack was related.
A spokesman for the vendor, Kojima Industries Corp, said it appeared to be some kind of cyberattack. A Toyota spokesman described it as a “supplier system failure”.
“Due to a system failure of a supplier in Japan, we have decided to suspend the operation of all 28 lines of the 14 local factories on March 1,” the company said in a statement on Monday.
A Toyota spokeswoman, contacted by AFP, did not confirm that it was a cyberattack, taking into account that the problem came from another company, whose name she did not want to reveal.
“It is true that we were hit by a kind of cyberattack,” a source close to a local Toyota supplier, Kojima Industries, told the Nikkei business daily. “We are assessing the damage… with the number one priority being to relaunch Toyota’s production system as quickly as possible,” the source added.
for now, Toyota suspended its production in Japan for only one day, and plans to analyze the situation on Tuesday, the group’s spokeswoman told AFP.
This measure will affect the production of “some 13,000 vehicles,” he specified.
The production halt comes as the world’s largest automaker is addressing supply chain delays around the world caused by the pandemic, which has forced it and other automakers to scale back manufacturing.
This month, Toyota also had to halt some of its production in North America due to parts shortages caused by protests by Canadian truckers.
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