Toyota blames factory shutdown in Japan on ‘insufficient disk space’

Toyota has blamed a latest shutdown of all of its factories in Japan on a system malfunction brought on by “insufficient disk space”.

The Japanese carmaker mentioned the stoppage on 29 August in any respect 14 of its home crops occurred after servers that course of orders for automobile elements broke down following a upkeep process carried out the day prior to this.

During this operation, “data that had accumulated in the database was deleted and organised, and an error occurred due to insufficient disk space, causing the system to stop”, Toyota mentioned on Wednesday.

The world’s top-selling automaker reiterated that the incident had not been brought on by a cyber-attack. “We would like to apologise once again to our customers, suppliers, and related parties for any inconvenience caused by the suspension of our domestic plants,” it mentioned.

Toyota mentioned the system had been restored after the info was transferred to a server with an even bigger capability, enabling it to restart manufacturing on the crops – which collectively account for a couple of third of the automaker’s international manufacturing – the next day.

“We will review our maintenance procedures and strengthen our efforts to prevent a recurrence, so that we can deliver as many vehicles to our customers as soon as possible,” it added.

Toyota is understood for its “just-in-time” manufacturing system of offering solely small deliveries of vital elements and different gadgets at numerous phases of the meeting course of.

This minimises prices and improves effectivity, and is studied by different producers and at enterprise colleges all over the world. However, as final month’s technical glitch proves, it comes with dangers.

Toyota needed to shut down the identical 14 factories for a day in February final 12 months when one among its suppliers mentioned one among its file servers had been contaminated with a virus, elevating questions concerning the cybersecurity of Japan’s provide chains.