Japan: Toyota factory will finally restart production

Toyota will resume activities at its factories in Japan, which have been shut down since yesterday. A malfunction in the production system caused a total shutdown at the national level.

Toyota announced that its production operations will resume on 25 production lines, distributed in several of its factories in Japan, from Wednesday morning. The last two factories affected by the disruption will resume operations in the afternoon, according to a company statement.

A large-scale computer failure in question

Tuesday August 29 is a computer failure of great magnitude which had paralyzed production for an entire day. Toyota is currently continuing its investigations to identify the cause of this failure. If the idea of the cyberattack was considered, it was ruled out after further consideration.

As a reminder, this breakdown prevented the entire computer system used to order certain components necessary for its production. Production had to be halted in 12 of its Japanese factories in the morning with nearly 25 production lines in the early hours of the day.

This major incident also had repercussions for Toyota Industries, the affiliated company, which had to partially suspend operations at two of its engine manufacturing plants.

Threats from the Chinese neighbor?

According to Reuters estimates, Japanese factories contribute about a third of the Japanese auto giant’s total output. The average daily production of factories located in Japan is 13,500 vehicles over the first half of the year, according to the agency’s calculations.

If the reasons for this incident remain unclear, for a few days some Japanese companies have been on alert due to several threatening calls. According to Japanese government authorities, these calls could come from China. These threats have been made since Japan decided to dump contaminated water from the Fukushima nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean.