Status: 27/09/2023, 20:46 p.m.
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A new Volkswagen Golf 8 (l) hovers on a production line at the VW plant. © Julian Stratenschulte/dpa
The cause is not known at first, the Wolfsburg-based carmaker has convened a crisis team. It doesn't look like a cyberattack from the outside. Several plants cannot work.
Wolfsburg - An IT malfunction has paralyzed the central infrastructure of the Volkswagen Group. Production at several plants is at a standstill, a company spokesman confirmed in the evening.
"We can confirm an IT malfunction of network components at the Wolfsburg site," said the spokesman. The four vehicle-producing plants in Germany are currently at a standstill - i.e. Wolfsburg, Emden, Zwickau and Osnabrück. The component plants in Kassel, Braunschweig and Salzgitter are also affected: "The malfunction has existed since 12:30 p.m. and is currently being analyzed. There are implications for vehicle-producing plants."
The VW subsidiary Audi is also affected by the IT disruption, as an Audi spokeswoman said in the evening at the request of the dpa. The extent to which this is the case is still being investigated.
Crisis team convened
The company spokesman was initially unable to say anything about the effects abroad. At the moment, it does not look like an attack from the outside, it was said in the evening. It is not yet possible to estimate when the problem will be solved and production will be up and running again. Previously, the "Handelsblatt" had reported on it. Accordingly, a crisis team was convened.
At the end of August, VW's rival Toyota was hit by a total failure. At the Japanese car giant, technical problems had led to a complete loss of production in Japan for about a day. The culprit was an error in the system for managing parts ordering. Later it was said that the cause was insufficient storage space on servers. The incident was not a cyber attack, it was emphasized.
Toyota had only had to close all its plants in March last year after its domestic supplier Kojima Industries suffered a system failure caused by a cyberattack. Again, all 28 of Toyota's production lines in the 14 factories were affected, affecting the production of about 13,000 vehicles. The group was also forced to temporarily suspend part of its operations in July after a cyberattack on a computer system at the port of Nagoya, a Toyota hub, disrupted port services for two days. Dpa
