Japan may experience a beer shortage as Asahi Group’s operations have been disrupted by a cyberattack that forced its systems offline. On Monday, Asahi Group announced that the outage had led to a suspension of order, shipment, and call center activities within Japan.
Currently, the company is manually processing orders as per today’s update, while system-based orders and large-scale shipments remain on hold. The attack has been identified as a ransomware incident, though Asahi is withholding detailed information to prevent further issues. The company does not have a concrete timeline for when the systems will be fully restored.
In a notice regarding the system failure, Asahi stated, “We took immediate action to contain and respond to the incident.” They also mentioned finding evidence of potential unauthorized data transfers and are investigating to understand the extent and nature of the compromised data.
The Financial Times reported on Thursday that major Japanese retailers anticipate that nationwide supplies of Asahi Super Dry, Japan’s most popular beer, could be exhausted by this weekend if the supply chain issues are not resolved promptly.
