Toyota has blamed a recent shutdown of all of its factories in Japan on a system malfunction caused by “insufficient disk space”.

The Japanese carmaker said the stoppage on 29 August at all 14 of its domestic plants occurred after servers that process orders for vehicle parts broke down following a maintenance procedure carried out the previous day.

During this operation, “data that had accumulated in the database was deleted and organised, and an error occurred due to insufficient disk space, causing the system to stop”, Toyota said on Wednesday.

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