Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has announced its largest ever extension of operations shutdown. This comes on the heels of a major cyber attack that made its IT systems inoperable on August 31. The impact has been felt most severely in JLR’s car assembly plants in Halewood and Solihull. Even their engine facility in Wolverhampton is similarly impacted, halting operations across all three locations. This disruption impacts JLR’s production plants in Slovakia, China and India, stopping production at the chain of global factories.
In response to the cyber attack, JLR has instructed its employees to work from home. They won’t be back in to the office until at least Tuesday. Under normal conditions, the automaker builds about 1,000 vehicles per day. The current continuing shutdown has many worried about their long-term production capacity.
The cyber attack has since been attributed to a group of teenage hackers who took credit for it just hours after it happened. This group has a documented history of attacks against UK businesses. Earlier this year, for example, they went after Marks & Spencer in a big way. They boasted about their extreme legal actions on the far-right messaging app Telegram with relish. This came only three days after the pro bono attack on JLR.
A spokesman for JLR, owned by India’s Tata Motors, had no immediate comment. According to media reports, the disruption could last for weeks. This confusion has led stakeholders to sue the agency over what could be disastrous future consequences.
Shaun Adams, manager of automotive parts supplier Qualplast He had particular concerns about how a long shutdown would affect their suppliers and the rest of the automotive industry.
“If this starts progressing over weeks, then we would have to seriously look at what we need to future-proof.” – Shaun Adams
The newest generation of new registration plates was recently released, on Sept. 1. Now, JLR finds itself with a new set of challenges as it steers through the turbulence resulting from the disrupter that was the cyber attack. Whether the company will be able to return to a state of normalcy is still undetermined, and stakeholders continue to watch the story unfold.