Toyota has confirmed that a disruption of operations at its Japan-based production plants was caused by a database server outage.<\/p>\n
The outage occurred on August 29, 2023, and resulted in the halting of production at 12 of the company’s 14 plants in Japan. The affected plants produce a variety of vehicles, including the Camry, Corolla, and Prius.<\/p>\n
In a statement, Toyota said that the outage was caused by a “system malfunction” during a planned IT systems maintenance event. The company said that the maintenance event was intended to organize data and delete fragmented data in a database. However, the storage was filled to capacity before the completion of the tasks, an error occurred, causing the system to shut down.<\/p>\n
The outage directly impacted the company’s production ordering system, which is used to plan and execute production tasks. As a result, no production could take place at the affected plants.<\/p>\n
Toyota said that its main servers and backup machines operate on the same system. Due to this, both systems faced the same failure, making a switchover impossible.<\/p>\n
The outage was eventually resolved on August 29, 2023, when Toyota’s IT team had prepared a larger capacity server to accept the data that was partially transferred two days back. This allowed Toyota’s engineers to restore the production ordering system and the plants to resume operations.<\/p>\n
Toyota said that it is “deeply sorry” for the inconvenience caused by the outage. It added that it is investigating the incident and will take steps to prevent a similar outage from happening in the future.<\/p>\n