More than 15,000 car dealerships throughout North America scrambled to process orders by hand after cyberattacks shut down their computerized management system this week.
Car dealers in the US and Canada were having difficulty fulfilling orders due to the disruption in the software that is used to manage their business and workflow.
Salespeople and back-office support staff were relegated to writing out orders and filling out paperwork the old-fashioned way — with pen and paper.
“My selling team can hand-write a buyer’s order,” Brian Benstock, general manager of Long Island City-based Paragon Honda and Paragon Acura dealership, told CNN.
CDK Global, the IT firm based in the Chicago area whose software was hacked, said it could be a few more days until it can get its systems back up and running.
A company rep said on Wednesday that it was forced to “shut all systems down” and that it “executed extensive testing and consulted with external third-party experts.”
On Thursday, a company rep told consumers that “at this time, we do not have an estimated time frame for resolution and therefore our dealers’ systems will not be available likely for several days.”
News of the message that was conveyed to customers was reported by Bloomberg News.
CDK told its customers that it had suffered a second cyberattack late on Wednesday evening — forcing it to shut down most of its systems for the second consecutive day on Thursday.
The 15,000-plus dealerships that rely on CDK systems to process transactions, access customer records, handle repairs and schedule appointments were left to fend for themselves.
“Dealers are very committed to protecting their customer information and are actively seeking information from CDK to determine the nature and scope of the cyber incident so they can respond appropriately,” the National Automobile Dealers Association said.
Tim Reuss, president of the Canadian Automobile Dealers Association, told Bloomberg News that the outage affected hundreds of dealerships north of the border.
Reuss said that the transactions that are being recorded by paper and pen will eventually need to be logged digitally once the systems are back up and running.
“There’s going to be a bit of a hangover from this incident,” he said.
BMW’s North America division released a statement to Reuters confirming that its dealerships were affected.
“The CDK outage is impacting automotive dealerships across the U.S. and Canada, including a portion of BMW Group dealers,” a spokesperson for BMW North America told Reuters.
Investment firm Brookfield Business Partners bought CDK in April 2022 for $6.41 billion in a cash deal, taking the last major publicly traded provider of software to auto dealers and manufacturers private.
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