Visited on Saturday by the new Prime Minister Jean Castex, who was making his first official trip to the field, the high-tech company X-Fab quickly experienced a new stir.
A few hours after the departure of the new host from Matignon, the group with an international dimension was the target of an unprecedented cyber attack on Sunday 5 July. Specializing in the production of electronic chips and semiconductors intended in particular for the automobile industry and telecommunications, the Coudray-Montceaux site has been shut down. The production of the six factories of the X-Fab group, located in France, in Germany, in Malaysia and in the United States, was stopped "in a preventive way", specifies the direction.
"Employees attached to production are at home"
"From one minute to the next, nothing responded," says Annick Jeannette-Stiti, elected CGT at X-Fab, who experienced the attack and its consequences on the operation of the business directly. "The employees attached to the production are at home", underlines the one who is worried about the employment within this company counting here nearly 1300 employees, including subcontractors.
This Tuesday evening, the trade unionist says that an intervention will be carried out "overnight", for a restart on Wednesday. On the management side, the bell sound is quite different. Uta Steinbrecher, press manager of X-Fab, specifies that “activities will not resume tomorrow. We don't know when they will resume. Production was stopped and all computer systems were blocked when we learned that we were under attack, to avoid collateral damage, she explains. Impossible to know how long it will take to analyze the systems, nor when we can restart them. Our teams of experts are on it, but we have no visibility. The financial impact of the attack also remains somewhat unclear.