Toyota Motor Corp yesterday said it had been hit by a technical glitch forcing it to suspend production at all of its 14 factories in Japan.
The world’s biggest automaker gave no further details on the stoppage, which began yesterday morning, but said it did not appear to be caused by a cyberattack.
The company said the glitch prevented its system from processing orders for parts, resulting in a suspension of a dozen factories or 25 production lines yesterday morning.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The company later halted the afternoon shift of the two other operational factories, suspending all of Toyota’s domestic plants, or 28 production lines.
“We do not believe the problem was caused by a cyberattack,” the company said in a statement. “We will continue to investigate the cause and to restore the system as soon as possible.”
The incident affected only Japanese factories, it added.
It was not immediately clear exactly when normal production might resume.
In the wake of the news, Toyota’s stock fell 0.20 percent to close at ￥2,431.5 in Tokyo trading.
Last year, Toyota suspended all of its domestic factories after a subsidiary was hit by a cyberattack.
The company is one of the biggest in Japan, and its production activities have an outsized impact on the country’s economy.
Toyota is famous for its “just-in-time” production system of providing only small deliveries of necessary parts and other items at various steps of the assembly process.
This practice minimizes costs while improving efficiency, and is studied by other manufacturers and at business schools around the world, but also comes with risks.
The auto titan retained its global top-selling crown for the third year in a row last year, and aims to earn an annual net profit of ￥2.58 trillion (US$17.61 billion) this fiscal year.
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