Asahi Group Holdings has resumed production at six Japanese beer plants after a cyberattack triggered a system outage that halted brewing, shipments and customer operations across the country.
The outage, which began on 29 September, forced the brewer 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 on Monday 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.
The brewer first disclosed the incident last week, noting 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.
Analysts and retailers signalled concerns about short-term supply. Retail chains Seven & i Holdings, Lawson and FamilyMart warned customers of possible shortages of Super Dry in the coming days as distribution bottlenecks persisted, according to local reports cited by Bloomberg. Shares in Asahi rose 1.6 per cent in Tokyo on Monday, recouping part of last week’s more than 7 per cent decline, as investors weighed the pace of the restart Bloomberg..
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. The brewer said it would provide updates as systems are restored and supply stabilises.
