Supplier suffers cyber attack Toyota suspends production at all Japanese factories

According to foreign media reports, on February 28, Toyota said it would suspend operations at all Japanese factories on March 1. The shutdown is due to a cyber attack on Toyota's main supplier Kojima Industries, which disrupted Toyota's parts supply management system.

Toyota supplier Kojima Industries said in a statement that it found an error in one of its file servers on the evening of Feb. 26. After restarting the server, the company confirmed that it was infected with the virus and found a threat message. A spokesman for the company said the message was written in English, but declined to give further details.

A Toyota spokesman described it as a "supplier system failure" and said the company would resume production in Japan from March 2. In early February, Toyota said it planned to produce 950000 vehicles in March, up from 843393 in the same period last year. Toyota has 14 factories and 28 assembly lines in Japan, and 14 factories are shut down for one day, equivalent to a loss of production of about 13000 vehicles.

At present, we do not know the mastermind behind the cyber attack and other related information.

Japan has joined the West in imposing sanctions on Russia because of the escalating situation in Russia and Ukraine. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told reporters on Feb. 28 that the government will investigate the incident and whether Russia was involved in the cyber attack. "the government is studying this issue. But it is difficult to answer whether the matter is related to Russia before a thorough investigation. "

The incident could hurt Toyota's efforts to resume full production. Toyota, which has been relatively responsive to supply chain problems during the outbreak, has been trying to increase production to make up for lost production and meet soaring global demand for cars.

However, Toyota was eventually affected by supply chain problems. In January, Toyota suspended production at its Tianjin plant because of the novel coronavirus epidemic. In the same month, Toyota's global production fell 15% from a year earlier. In February, some major trade routes between the United States and Canada were closed because of protests, affecting some of Toyota's production operations in North America.

Due to production disruptions at some factories in January and February, Toyota cut its production target for fiscal 2021 (April 2021-March 2022) to 8.5 million vehicles from 9 million previously.