Toyota's 14 plants in Japan shut down! The reason is announced

On September 6, Toyota Motor responded on its website to the suspension of production at 14 plants in Japan. Toyota Motor said that the previous shutdown was caused by insufficient disk space for data storage during system server maintenance, not a cyber attack.

According to a previous report by "Automotive Industry Concern", on the morning of August 29, a total of 12 of Toyota's 14 vehicle plants in Japan were suspended due to suspected system failures, involving a total of 25 production lines. At the time, a Toyota spokesman said that 25 assembly lines at 12 factories had been shut down and orders for parts could not be placed because of a malfunction in the production command system. The spokesperson said: "It is not believed that the system failure was caused by a cyber attack, and it appears that this failure is limited to the Japanese factory." In addition, from the afternoon of September 29, the suspension will be extended to a total of 28 production lines at all 14 vehicle plants.

Subsequently, Toyota Motor said on its official website that the system failure was not caused by a cyber attack, but the detailed cause needs to be further investigated.

In this latest response, Toyota Motor said that the system failure was caused by the inability to use a portion of multiple servers for parts order processing. On August 27, the day before the failure, Toyota Motor performed regular maintenance of the production indication system, and during the maintenance process, when the data stored in the database was deleted and sorted, the capacity of the working disk was insufficient, and the system was paralyzed after an error was reported. At the same time, because these servers were running on the same system, the backup equipment also had the same failure, so it could not be switched, and the production of the system including the backup machine was affected, which eventually led to the suspension of production of all plants in Japan on August 29.

Toyota then moved the data to a larger server on August 29, and the plant resumed operations on August 30. However, due to a short-term shutdown that reduced production of about 14,000 new vehicles, Toyota Motor plans to take measures to increase daily production.

Toyota Motor said that it confirmed that the fault was not caused by a cyber attack through the verification work of scenario reproduction, and apologized for this, and promised to improve system maintenance procedures to prevent similar incidents from repeating.

On August 30, the Toyota Motor Group announced its global production and sales report for July 2023. According to the data, Toyota's global sales in July 2023 were 859,500 units, a year-on-year increase of 7.82%, a year-on-year increase for six consecutive months, of which sales in the Japanese domestic market increased by 35.19% y/y to 141,200 units, and overseas markets increased by 3.69% y/y to 718,300 units. In terms of production capacity, Toyota's global production of 809,400 new vehicles in July increased by 14.56% y/y, marking the seventh consecutive month of year-on-year growth, with the Japanese domestic market up 39.16% y/y to 308,700 units, and the overseas market up 3.2% y/y to 500,700 units.

Regarding the increase in global production and sales data, Toyota explained that sales and production in July 2023 exceeded the same period of the previous year due to semiconductor supply problems and the easing of the new crown pneumonia.

At the beginning of this year, Toyota Motor expected to produce about 9.5 million to 10.6 million units in 2023 (a calendar year), but the production situation was uncertain due to the global chip shortage, when Toyota pointed out that the final production could be reduced by 10%. However, thanks to semiconductor supply problems and the easing of the new crown pneumonia, as of August 29, Toyota Motor has informed major parts suppliers of its latest production target, Toyota has set global production of the "Toyota and Lexus" brand in 2023 at 10.2 million units, which will increase by 10% compared to 2022, and if there is no accident, it will significantly refresh the record high of 9.05 million units in 2019.

In addition, according to Toyota's announced medium-term production plan, Toyota Motor expects global production of about 10.7 million units next year and about 11 million units by 2025, of which production in the Japanese domestic market will gradually increase to more than 3.5 million units in 2025.

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