Toyota was forced to stop production at 12 car assembly plants late last month because a server ran out of disk space.

As BleepingComputer reports, on Aug. 27, Toyota halted production at 12 of its 14 assembly plants in Japan due to a "glitch" in its IT system. Today, Toyota revealed that the problem was actually a lack of storage space.

In a post on the company's Japanese news portal, Toyota apologized and said the problem stemmed from servers becoming unavailable. It turns out maintenance work carried out on Aug. 27 led to a parts processing server running out of disk space during a database reorganization job. No free storage space meant the server stopped working, and then the same problem occurred on the backup server.

With no server capable of handling parts processing, operations at the majority of Toyota's domestic car production facilities stopped while the company brought a larger capacity server online. It's thought the incident stopped around 13,000 cars being manufactured per day, with the system being offline for a couple of days.

Toyota has since identified the cause of the problem and implemented countermeasures to stop it happening again. The company also promised to "review our maintenance work procedures and strengthen our efforts to prevent recurrence in order to deliver as many cars as possible to our customers as quickly as possible."

Toyota really does need to get on top of its server problems when you consider the company recently embraced generative AI to help it design new electric vehicles. Rather than storage, it's running out of memory that's the main concern when dealing with AI workloads.