– Boss, boss! We are under attack!
– OK, but still check the disk space before launching the alert.
This dialogue may not be imaginary.
Toyota’s 14 Japanese factories were forced to close their doors for two days last week. The cause ? A massive cyberattack? No, a production system malfunction due to… lack of disk space.
“The data accumulated in the database has been deleted”
Toyota says 28 vehicle assembly lines were shut down on August 28 due to the unavailability of “servers that process parts orders.” The problem appeared during maintenance work on August 27.
“During the maintenance procedure, the data accumulated in the database was deleted, and an error occurred due to insufficient disk space, causing the system to shut down. As these servers were running on the same system, a similar failure occurred in the backup. And it was not possible to carry out a recovery” explains the Japanese manufacturer.
A Reuters article mentions that the malfunction occurred following an update to the parts ordering system.
Toyota says outage was ‘not due to a cyberattack’
The company said it restored its production order system on August 29 after transferring the data to a larger server.
Toyota also insisted that the outage was “not due to a cyberattack”.
In February 2022, Toyota had to close its 14 Japanese factories following a supplier hack. Toyota was also hacked in 2021. And at least three times in 2019.