Asahi Group Holdings which was hit by a cyberattack on September 29, resulting in stoppage of operations, resumed production at six Japanese beer plants on October 2. The cyberattack triggered a system outage that halted brewing, shipments and customer operations across the country.
Asahi was forced to suspend order processing, shipping and call centre functions, and prompted retailers and bars to warn of dwindling stock of flagship Super Dry and other drinks.
A spokesperson said that production restarted on 2 October and the company is prioritising supply while some systems remain offline. “Some parts of the system are still shut and the company is processing orders manually to prioritise its supply framework,” the spokesperson said, adding that there is no timeline yet for full restoration. Asahi earlier confirmed it was still checking the status of its other factories and could not estimate when systems would be fully restored.
Asahi disclosed that the disruption had affected operations at subsidiaries across Japan, including call centres and customer service desks. “At this time, there has been no confirmed leakage of personal information or customer data to external parties,” the company said in a notice, adding that the system failure was confined to domestic operations and that recovery work was ongoing.
Asahi, known globally for Super Dry beer and Nikka Whisky, is assessing potential impacts on earnings while continuing to investigate the root cause. The company has not disclosed the nature of the attack, though industry reports have pointed to ransomware as a possible factor. Asahi is the biggest brewer in Japan, but also owns global beer brands including Peroni, Pilsner Urquell and Grolsch. It also owns Fullers in the UK, which is brewed in West London.
Asahi Resumes Beer Production, After Cyber Attack Outage
