Production at 12 Toyota plants came to a standstill due to a server glitch. The problem was caused due to a lack of disk space leading to a server unavailability.
Regular maintenance on servers used to process parts orders led to data accumulation leading to a lack of storage space. This led the servers to become unavailable. Since these servers were operating on the same system, a similar problem occurred on the backup server. Therefore, the company was unable to switch to the backup and resume production.
“We would like to apologize for the inconvenience caused to our customers, suppliers, and related parties due to the suspension of operations at our domestic factories due to a production instruction system malfunction at the end of last month.”: Read part of an apology by Toyota.
The system maintenance took place on August 27th and led to an outage on the 29th of the month.
Server Outage not Caused by Cyberattack
Production was stopped for close to a day. In fact, the server error stopped the production of about 13,000 personal cars. After Toyota brought in a larger capacity server, the orders system was brought back online. Thereafter Toyota was able to resume production.
The global automaker has promised to review its maintenance procedures.
“We will review our maintenance procedures and strengthen our efforts to prevent a recurrence,” the company said in a statement.
In addition, the company was quick to point out the server outage was not caused by a cyber-attack.
