Jaguar Land Rover has told staff at its car factories in Merseyside, Solihull and Wolverhampton to stay away from work until at least Tuesday following a major cyber attack.
The attack, which took place at the weekend forced the firm to take all of its key IT systems offline. According to reports, that means no manufacturing has taken place in the UK since Sunday.
Production has also been suspended at plants around the world.
Ordinarily it would be producing 1000 cars every day.
JLR explained that it took “immediate action to mitigate its impact by proactively shutting down our systems.
“We are now working at pace to restart our global applications in a controlled manner. At this stage there is no evidence any customer data has been stolen but our retail and production activities have been severely disrupted.”
Earlier this week, the hacker group, which was responsible for the attack on Marks and Spencer said that it had broken into JLR’s systems. M&S estimated that the cyber attack could cost it £300m.
It coincides with a key time in the automotive sector with new registration plates launching on 1st September – typically the busiest time of the year for sales and deliveries.
