Disk space shortage shuttered Toyota assembly plants

Toyota assembly plants across Japan shut down for about a day last week due to a malfunction following routine maintenance. Insufficient disk space in servers used to process parts orders caused the systems to become unavailable, according to the automaker.

Toyota this week provided the cause of the production system outage and reassured customers and partners that the company did not suffer from a cyberattack, but rather a lack of disk space across some of the servers in its production order system. The malfunction suspended operations at some 14 plants in Japan. (Read more about the biggest outages of the year)

Following an investigation into the cause of the incident, Toyota issued a statement to apologize and provide more details.

“The system malfunction was caused by the unavailability of some multiple servers that process parts orders. As for the circumstances, regular maintenance work was performed on August 27, the day before the malfunction occurred. During the maintenance procedure, data that had accumulated in the database was deleted and organized, and an error occurred due to insufficient disk space, causing the system to stop,” the company said in a statement.

Because the servers were running on the same system, a similar failure occurred in the backup function, making a switchover not possible at that time, the company explained. The malfunction directly led to the suspension of domestic plant operations. When the data was transferred to a server with a larger capacity on August 29, the plants were able to resume operations the following day, August 30.

To reassure their customers, partners, and suppliers that it did not fall victim to a cyberattack, Toyota said it had investigated, replicated, and verified the situation. “We would like to report that we have identified the above as the true cause,” the company said in a statement.