Japan Airlines faces disruptions due to cyber attack

More than a dozen flights at several Japanese airports delayed

A Japan Airlines passenger jet at Tokyo International Airport at Haneda. Japan Airlines reported a cyber attack on Thursday causing flight delays. AFP

Japan Airlines (JAL) on Thursday reported a cyber attack that caused delays to domestic and international flights but later said it had found and addressed the cause.

Problems with the airline's baggage check-in system had delayed more than a dozen flights at several Japanese airports, public broadcaster NHK said, but there were no mass cancellations or major disruption.

JAL is the country's second-biggest airline after All Nippon Airways.

“We identified and addressed the cause of the issue. We are checking the system recovery status,” JAL said in a post on social media platform X.

“Sales for both domestic and international flights departing today have been suspended. We apologise for any inconvenience caused,” the post said.

Earlier Thursday, a JAL spokeswoman told AFP the company had been subjected to a cyber attack.

Network disruption began at 7:24am on Thursday (2:24am UAE time), JAL said.

Then “at 8:56am, we temporarily isolated the router (a device for exchanging data between networks) that was causing the disruption”, it added.

JAL shares fell as much as 2.5 per cent in morning trade after the news emerged, before recovering slightly.

The airline is just the latest Japanese company to be hit by a cyber attack.

Japan's space agency (Jaxa) said last year that it was likely penetrated by a cyber attack by unknown entities, but no sensitive information about rockets or satellites was accessed.

The same year, Nagoya Port, one of Japan's busiest, was crippled by a ransomware attack that was blamed on Lockbit, a Russia-based cyber crime organisation.

Japan's National Centre of Incident Readiness and Strategy for Cybersecurity (NISC) – the agency responsible for defences against cyberattacks – was itself reportedly infiltrated by hackers last year for as long as nine months.

In 2022, the government said a cyberattack was behind disruption at a Toyota supplier that forced the top-selling carmaker to halt operations at domestic plants for a day.

More recently, the popular Japanese video-sharing website Niconico suspended its services in June because it was under a large-scale cyberattack, its operator said.