The Wall Street Journal
By
Dominic Chopping
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Updated Sept. 29, 2025 6:39 am ET
Jaguar Land Rover discovered a cyberattack late last month, forcing the company to shut down its computer systems and halt production.
Jaguar Land Rover will restart some sections of its manufacturing operations in the coming days, as it begins its recovery from a cyberattack that has crippled production for around a month.
“As the controlled, phased restart of our operations continues, we are taking further steps towards our recovery and the return to manufacture of our world‑class vehicles,” the company said in a statement Monday.
The news comes a day after the U.K. government stepped in to provide financial support for the company, underwriting a 1.5 billion-pound ($2.01 billion) loan guarantee in a bid to support the company’s cash reserves and help it pay suppliers.
The loan will be provided by a commercial bank and is backed by the government’s export credit agency. It will be paid back over five years.
“Jaguar Land Rover is an iconic British company which employs tens of thousands of people,” U.K. Treasury Chief Rachel Reeves said in a statement Sunday.
“Today we are protecting thousands of those jobs with up to 1.5 billion pounds in additional private finance, helping them support their supply chain and protect a vital part of the British car industry,” she added.
The U.K. automaker, owned by India’s Tata Motors, discovered a cyberattack late last month, forcing the company to shut down its computer systems and halt production.
The company behind Land Rover, Jaguar and Range Rover models, has been forced to repeatedly extend the production shutdown over the past few weeks as it races to restart systems safely with the help of cybersecurity experts flown in from around the globe, the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre and law enforcement.
Last week, the company began a gradual restart of its operations, bringing some IT systems back online. It has informed suppliers and retail partners that sections of its digital network is back up and running, and processing capacity for invoicing has been increased as it works to quickly clear the backlog of payments to suppliers.
JLR has U.K. plants in Solihull and Wolverhampton in the West Midlands, in addition to Halewood in Merseyside. It is one of the U.K.’s largest exporters and a major employer, employing 34,000 directly in its U.K. operations. It also operates the largest supply chain in the U.K. automotive sector, much of it made up of small- and medium-sized enterprises, and employing around 120,000 people, according to the government.
Labor unions had warned that thousands of jobs in the JLR supply chain were at risk due to the disruption and had urged the government to step in with a furlough plan to support them.
U.K. trade union Unite, which represents thousands of workers employed at JLR and throughout its supply chain, said the government’s loan guarantee is an important first step.
“The money provided must now be used to ensure job guarantees and to also protect skills and pay in JLR and its supply chain,” Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said in a statement.
therecord.media Alexander Martin
September 17th, 2025
Shares in a British automaker supplier plummeted 55% Wednesday as it warned that a cyberattack on Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) was impacting its business, adding to concerns that the incident is sending a “shockwave” through the country’s industrial sector, according to a senior politician.
Shares in Autins, a company providing specialist insulation components for Jaguar vehicles, opened 55% below its Tuesday closing price on the AIM exchange for smaller companies. As of publication the price recovered slightly to a 40% drop.
In a trading update the company acknowledged that JLR stopping all production since the cyberattack on September 1 was having a material effect on its own operations. Its chief executive, Andy Bloomer, told investors the attack was “concerning not just for Autins, but the wider automotive supply chain.”
Bloomer added the true impact of the disruption “will not be known for some time,” but that Autins was “doing everything possible to protect our business now and ensure we are ready to benefit as we come out the other side.”
These protective measures have included using banked hours for employees, delaying and cancelling raw material orders, as well as pausing discretionary spend across the business. Autins employed 148 people and recorded revenues of just over £31 million last year, according to its annual results.
It comes as Liam Byrne, a Labour MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North — one of the United Kingdom’s parliamentary constituencies in a region dominated by automotive manufacturing — warned the JLR disruption was “a cyber shockwave ripping through our industrial heartlands.”
“If government stands back, that shockwave is going to destroy jobs, businesses, and pay packets across Britain. Ministers must step up fast with emergency support to stop this digital siege at JLR spreading economic havoc through the supply chain,” stated Byrne.
It follows JLR announcing on Tuesday that its global operations would remain shuttered until at least the middle of next week. Thousands of JLR employees have been told not to report for work due to the standstill.
Reports suggest that thousands more workers at supply-chain businesses are also being temporarily laid off due to the shutdown. The Unite union has called on the government to provide a furlough scheme to support impacted workers.
The extended disruption is increasing the costs of the incident for JLR, which is one of Britain’s most significant industrial producers — accounting for roughly 4% of goods exports last year — and risks damaging the British economy as a whole.
Lucas Kello, the director of the University of Oxford's Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research, told Recorded Future News last week: “This is more than a company outage — it’s an economic security incident.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Business and Trade did not respond to a request for comment. The Prime Minister's official spokesman previously stated there were "no discussions around taxpayers' money" being used to help JLR suppliers.
bbc.com 12.09 Theo LeggettBusiness correspondent
The past two weeks have been dreadful for Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), and the crisis at the car maker shows no sign of coming to an end.
A cyber attack, which first came to light on 1 September, forced the manufacturer to shut down its computer systems and close production lines worldwide.
Its factories in Solihull, Halewood, and Wolverhampton are expected to remain idle until at least Wednesday, as the company continues to assess the damage.
JLR is thought to have lost at least £50m so far as a result of the stoppage. But experts say the most serious damage is being done to its network of suppliers, many of whom are small and medium sized businesses.
The government is now facing calls for a furlough scheme to be set up, to prevent widespread job losses.
David Bailey, professor of business economics at Birmingham Business School, told the BBC: "There's anywhere up to a quarter of a million people in the supply chain for Jaguar Land Rover.
"So if there's a knock-on effect from this closure, we could see companies going under and jobs being lost".
Under normal circumstances, JLR would expect to build more than 1,000 vehicles a day, many of them at its UK plants in Solihull and Halewood. Engines are assembled at its Wolverhampton site. The company also has large car factories in China and Slovakia, as well as a smaller facility in India.
JLR said it closed down its IT networks deliberately in order to protect them from damage. However, because its production and parts supply systems are heavily automated, this meant cars simply could not be built.
Sales were also heavily disrupted, though workarounds have since been put in place to allow dealerships to operate.
Initially, the carmaker seemed relatively confident the issue could be resolved quickly.
Nearly two weeks on, it has become abundantly clear that restarting its computer systems has been a far from simple process. It has already admitted that some data may have been seen or stolen, and it has been working with the National Cyber Security Centre to investigate the incident.
Experts say the cost to JLR itself is likely to be between £5m and £10m per day, meaning it has already lost between £50m and £100m. However, the company made a pre-tax profit of £2.5bn in the year to the end of March, which implies it has the financial muscle to weather a crisis that lasts weeks rather than months.
'Some suppliers will go bust'
JLR sits at the top of a pyramid of suppliers, many of whom are highly dependent on the carmaker because it is their main customer.
They include a large number of small and medium-sized firms, which do not have the resources to cope with an extended interruption to their business.
"Some of them will go bust. I would not be at all surprised to see bankruptcies," says Andy Palmer, a one-time senior executive at Nissan and former boss of Aston Martin.
He believes suppliers will have begun cutting their headcount dramatically in order to keep costs down.
Mr Palmer says: "You hold back in the first week or so of a shutdown. You bear those losses.
"But then, you go into the second week, more information becomes available – then you cut hard. So layoffs are either already happening, or are being planned."
A boss at one smaller JLR supplier, who preferred not to be named, confirmed his firm had already laid off 40 people, nearly half of its workforce.
Meanwhile, other companies are continuing to tell their employees to remain at home with the hours they are not working to be "banked", to be offset against holidays or overtime at a later date.
There seems little expectation of a swift return to work.
One employee at a major supplier based in the West Midlands told the BBC they were not expecting to be back on the shop floor until 29 September. Hundreds of staff, they say, had been told to remain at home.
When automotive firms cut back, temporary workers brought in to cover busy periods are usually the first to go.
There is generally a reluctance to get rid of permanent staff, as they often have skills that are difficult to replace. But if cashflow dries up, they may have little choice.
Labour MP Liam Byrne, who chairs the Commons Business and Trade Committee, says this means government help is needed.
"What began in some online systems is now rippling through the supply chain, threatening a cashflow crunch that could turn a short-term shock into long-term harm", he says.
"We cannot afford to see a cornerstone of our advanced manufacturing base weakened by events beyond its control".
The trade union Unite has called for a furlough system to be set up to help automotive suppliers. This would involve the government subsidising workers' pay packets while they are unable to do their jobs, taking the burden off their employers.
"Thousands of these workers in JLR's supply chain now find their jobs are under an immediate threat because of the cyber attack," says Unite general secretary, Sharon Graham.
"Ministers need to act fast and introduce a furlough scheme to ensure that vital jobs and skills are not lost while JLR and its supply chain get back on track."
Business and Trade Minister Chris Bryant said: "We recognise the significant impact this incident has had on JLR and their suppliers, and I know this is a worrying time for those affected.
"I met with the chief executive of JLR yesterday to discuss the impact of the incident. We are also in daily contact with the company and our cyber experts about resolving this issue."
