Toyota Factories Shut Down When Company Runs Out of Disk Space

Victor Tangermann
Wed, September 6, 2023 

Disk Full

Japanese auto giant Toyota has had to shut down all of its factories in the country due to what the company claims to be a system malfunction triggered by "insufficient disk space."

In simple terms, the second-biggest carmaker in the world just had to grind production to a halt because it ran out of storage.

As The Guardian reports, the carmaker had to issue a stoppage on August 29 at all 14 of its Japan-based plants, representing roughly a third of its global production.

It's a major fumble that goes to show that even in Japan, a country often seen as a pioneer of cutting-edge technologies, minor glitches can cascade into company-wide chaos and bring down entire titans of industry.

Station Laggin

A maintenance procedure apparently caused the company's servers to break down when "data that had accumulated in the database was deleted and organized, and an error occurred due to insufficient disk space, causing the system to stop," Toyota said in a statement, as quoted by The Guardian.

As a result,  the company had to transfer the data to a server with sufficient capacity.

"We would like to apologize once again to our customers, suppliers, and related parties for any inconvenience caused by the suspension of our domestic plants," the company said in the statement.

The incident goes to show there are very real risks to Toyota's renowned and well-studied "just-in-time" production system, "in which each process produces only what is needed for the next process in a continuous flow," according to the company's website.

The company, however, was able to rule out one possible cause: it definitely wasn't a cyberattack. In other words, the company has nobody to blame but itself for the interruption.