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On Sept. 6, Toyota responded on its website to the reasons for the shutdown of 14 factories in Japan. Toyota said the previous shutdown was due to insufficient data storage disk space during the maintenance of the system server, not a cyber attack.

A total of 12 of Toyota's 14 plants in Japan were suspended on the morning of Aug. 29, involving 25 production lines, according to a previous report by Automotive Industry concern. A Toyota spokesman said at the time that 25 assembly lines at 12 plants had been shut down and that spare parts orders could not be placed due to a failure in the production command system. The spokesman pointed out: "do not think that the system failure is caused by a cyber attack, it seems that the failure is limited to local factories in Japan." In addition, starting from the afternoon of the 29th, the shutdown will be extended to all 14 vehicle factories, with a total of 28 production lines.

Toyota later said on its website that the system failure was not caused by a cyber attack, but that the detailed causes needed to be further identified.

In its latest response, Toyota said the system failure was caused by the unavailability of some of the servers that processed parts orders. The day before the failure, that is, August 27, Toyota carried out regular maintenance of the production instruction system. During the maintenance process, when the data stored in the database was deleted and sorted out, the disk capacity for the operation was insufficient and the system was paralyzed after the error was reported. At the same time, because these servers were running on the same system, there was the same failure on the backup equipment, so they could not be switched over. Due to the suspension of production of the system, including the spare machine, all factories in Japan were shut down on August 29.

Toyota then transferred the data to a larger server on Aug. 29, and the plant resumed operations on Aug. 30. But Toyota plans to take steps to increase average daily production after a brief shutdown cut production of about 14000 new cars.

Toyota said it had identified the cause through the verification of the scenario, confirming that the failure was not caused by a cyber attack, and apologized, and Toyota promised to improve its system maintenance procedures to prevent the recurrence of similar incidents.

On August 30, Toyota Motor Group released the global production and marketing report for July 2023. According to the data, Toyota sold 859500 vehicles worldwide in July, up 7.82 per cent year-on-year and the sixth consecutive month of year-on-year growth, including 35.19 per cent year-on-year sales in Japan to 141200 vehicles and 3.69 per cent to 718300 vehicles in overseas markets. In terms of production capacity, Toyota produced 809400 new cars worldwide in July, up 14.56 per cent from a year earlier and the seventh consecutive month of year-on-year growth, with the domestic market in Japan rising 39.16 per cent to 308700 and overseas markets up 3.2 per cent to 500700.

With regard to the growth in global production and sales data, Toyota explained that sales and production in July 2023 exceeded the same period a year earlier due to semiconductor supply problems and some relief by COVID-19.

At the beginning of this year, Toyota expected a production target of about 9.5 million-10.6 million vehicles in 2023, but production was uncertain due to global chip shortages, when Toyota pointed out that final production could be cut by 10 per cent. But thanks to semiconductor supply problems and the relief of COVID-19, Toyota has informed its major parts suppliers of its latest production target. Toyota has set the global production of the "Toyota and Lexus" brand at 10.2 million vehicles in 2023. This production will increase by 10% over 2022, and if nothing happens, it will significantly set an all-time high of 9.05 million vehicles in 2019.

In addition, according to Toyota's medium-term production plan, Toyota expects to produce about 10.7 million vehicles worldwide next year and about 11 million by 2025, of which production in Japan's domestic market will gradually rise to more than 3.5 million in 2025.

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