The sudden stoppage of the factories brought losses of millions.
An easily rectified situation. According to Toyota, the systems were restored as soon as the data was transferred to a larger server.
Car manufacturer Toyota has 14 factories in Japan assembling parts needed for car manufacturing. At the end of August, the majority, 12 factories, had to be temporarily shut down.
The reason was not a cyber attack or sabotage, but a beginner’s error: Bleeping Computer says that the company’s database servers ran out of space.
According to Toyota, the company was carrying out pre-planned IT system maintenance. The purpose of the maintenance task was to reorganize the data in the database and delete data that could not be reconstructed. However, in the middle of a maintenance task, the servers’ hard drives filled up.
Because this happened in the middle of a maintenance run, it caused an error in the systems that shut down the entire database system.
Since Toyota’s main servers and backup systems run on the same system, both shut down at the same time. Consequently, Toyota factories could not switch to the backup system when the main system went down.
Due to the mishap, Toyota’s production could not prepare and complete any production task for two days. Normally, Toyota assembles 13,000 cars a day, which means that the interruption of production led to a shortage of an estimated 25,000 cars and direct losses of millions of euros.
Such a big shortfall could have serious consequences for the car giant in the international market, which it would certainly not want for itself right now. It’s had quite a rough year.
In May, Toyota announced twice that it had made mistakes in the settings of its systems, as a result of which the personal data of millions of customers may have been leaked.
Last year, a backdoor was found in Toyota’s systems, which was used to gain access to thousands of encrypted documents, such as the company’s internal projects and production chain information.
The story was originally published In Tiv.