Japan Airlines on Thursday reported a cyberattack that caused delays to domestic and international flights, but later said it had found and resolved the cause.
Public broadcaster NHK said more than a dozen flights were delayed at several Japanese airports due to problems with the airline’s baggage check-in system, but there were no mass cancellations or major disruptions.
Japan Airlines (JAL) is the country’s second largest airline after All Nippon Airways (ANA).
“We identified and resolved the cause of the problem. We are investigating the system recovery status,” JAL said in a post on social media platform X.
“Sales have been suspended for both domestic and international flights departing today. We apologize for any inconvenience,” the post said.
Earlier on Thursday, a JAL spokesman told AFP the company had been hit by a cyber attack.
The network disruption began at 7:24 a.m. Thursday (Wednesday 2224 GMT), JAL said in a statement.
Then “at 8:56 am, we temporarily isolated the router (a device for exchanging data between networks) that was causing the interference”, it added.
After the news came out, JAL shares fell by 2.5 percent in morning trade, then recovered slightly.
The airline is the latest Japanese company to be hit by a cyber attack.
Japan’s space agency JAXA said in 2023 that there was a possibility of a cyber attack by unknown entities, but that no sensitive information about rockets or satellites could be accessed.
That same year, Nagoya Port, one of Japan’s busiest ports, was damaged by a ransomware attack that was blamed on the Russia-based cybercrime organization Lockbit.
Japan’s National Center of Incident Readiness and Strategy for Cybersecurity (NISC) – the agency responsible for protecting against cyber attacks – was reportedly infiltrated by hackers for nine months in 2023.
The government said a cyber attack was behind the disruption at a Toyota supplier in 2022 that forced the top-selling automaker to halt operations at domestic plants for a day.
Most recently, popular Japanese video-sharing website Niconico suspended its services in June after it was hit by a massive cyberattack, its operator said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
