September 7, 2023
Toyota has confirmed that a disruption of operations at its Japan-based production plants was caused by a database server outage.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The sources for this piece include an article in BleepingComputer.
