TOKYO: Toyota said on Tuesday that it has been hit by a technical glitch that forced it to suspend production at all of its fourteen factories in Japan.
The world’s top-selling manufacturer said that the malfunction in the production order system occurred during the daytime on Monday and forced stoppages on Tuesday morning.
The automaker said that the issue did not appear to be caused by a cyberattack, but that a probe was underway, AFP reported.
The glitch prevented the company’s system from processing orders for parts, leading to a suspension of a dozen factories or twenty-five production lines on Tuesday morning, it said in a statement.
It later decided to halt the afternoon shift of the 2 other operational factories, suspending all of the companies’ domestic plants, or twenty-eight production lines.
Toyota said that the incident affected only Japanese factories.
Later in the day, Toyota announced in a statement that production at twelve domestic plants would resume Wednesday morning, with all plants likely to be operational from the second shift of the day onwards.
Reports of the suspension briefly sent Toyota’s stocks into the red in the morning session before recovering.
Toyota Suspended Domestic Factories in 2022
In 2022, Toyota had to suspend all of its domestic factories after a subsidiary was targeted by a cyberattack.
The automaker is one of the biggest in Japan, and its production operations have an outsized impact on the country’s economy.
The company is famous for its “just-in-time” production system of providing only small deliveries of essential parts and other items at different steps of the assembly process.
This practice minimizes costs while improving effectiveness and is studied by other automakers and business schools around the world, but also comes with risks.
Toyota retained its global top-selling auto crown for the 3rd year in a row in 2022 and aims to earn an annual net profit of 17.6 billion dollars this fiscal year.
Leading automakers are enjoying a robust increase of global demand after the Covid-19 pandemic slowed manufacturing activities.
