Greater than 15,000 automobile dealerships throughout North America scrambled to process orders by hand after cyberattacks shut down their computerized management system this week.
Automotive dealers within the US and Canada were having difficulty fulfilling orders as a result of the disruption within the software that’s used to administer 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 within the Chicago area whose software was hacked, said it might be a couple of more days until it could get its systems back up and running.
An organization 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, an organization rep told consumers that “at the moment, we shouldn’t have an estimated time-frame for resolution and due to this fact our dealers’ systems won’t 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 depend 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 looking for information from CDK to find out the character and scope of the cyber incident in order that 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 tons of of dealerships north of the border.
Reuss said that the transactions which can be being recorded by paper and pen will eventually have to be logged digitally once the systems are back up and running.
“There’s going to be a little bit of a hangover from this incident,” he said.
BMW’s North America division released an announcement 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 money deal, taking the last major publicly traded provider of software to auto dealers and manufacturers private.
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Greater than 15,000 automobile dealerships throughout North America scrambled to process orders by hand after cyberattacks shut down their computerized management system this week.
Automotive dealers within the US and Canada were having difficulty fulfilling orders as a result of the disruption within the software that’s used to administer 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 within the Chicago area whose software was hacked, said it might be a couple of more days until it could get its systems back up and running.
An organization 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, an organization rep told consumers that “at the moment, we shouldn’t have an estimated time-frame for resolution and due to this fact our dealers’ systems won’t 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 depend 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 looking for information from CDK to find out the character and scope of the cyber incident in order that 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 tons of of dealerships north of the border.
Reuss said that the transactions which can be being recorded by paper and pen will eventually have to be logged digitally once the systems are back up and running.
“There’s going to be a little bit of a hangover from this incident,” he said.
BMW’s North America division released an announcement 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 money deal, taking the last major publicly traded provider of software to auto dealers and manufacturers private.
With Post Wires
