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Auto dealers and car buyers across the country are in shock after software provider CDK Global was hit by a cyber incident earlier this week.
The power outage has forced many people, such as Celebrity Motor Cars owner Tom Maori, to revert to old ways of going about their daily business.
Maori, whose dealership is based in New Jersey, said in an interview with FOX Business on Friday that he has had to rely on manual paperwork to continue selling vehicles and providing other services amid the chaos.
“We do it by hand,” he said. “That’s all we can do.”
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CDK Global reported two cyber incidents this week, taking its systems temporarily offline after the first incident on Wednesday and again after a second incident later that same evening.
The CDK Global logo displayed on a smartphone. (Photo illustration: Igor Golovniov/SOPA Images/LightRocket via / Getty Images)
“We cannot predict how long it will take to resolve the issue, so dealer systems will likely be unavailable for several days,” CDK Global said on its customer support line on Friday afternoon.
Manual sales and repair workarounds are causing his dealership to “take double or triple the time,” he told FOX Business.
Maori said that in addition to reverting to manual operations, an outage in CDK Global’s software was causing issues “with the inability to process the financial side of transactions.”
A CDK Global spokesman said: “We remain committed to restoring services and enabling dealers to return to normal business as soon as possible.” (iStock)
“This is called trade financing,” he explained, “We can’t get banks to fund the trade and collect the information, so no money is being traded. Obviously, we’re talking millions of dollars at our dealership, but we’re talking billions of dollars across the country.”
“We can sell [cars]But it is very difficult as we cannot do business internally and when we can’t do that it becomes a huge cash flow problem,” he added.
Car dealership software goes down after provider hits cyber incident
Maori said when customers have their cars serviced, his automotive division “has to do everything manually”, including putting together the repair order “so the customer can pay”.
“And if there are parts that are needed to repair a vehicle, CDK has an inventory system and those parts are not deducted from the system so when they use parts from their inventory, there is no automatic alert sent to the manufacturer to replenish those parts,” he told FOX Business. “The manufacturer is not getting the alert, so the whole supply chain system is grinding to a halt.”
New cars lined up in the dealer’s parking lot. (/iStock)
CDK Global spokesperson Lisa Finney told FOX Business Thursday afternoon that CDK Global is working with third-party experts to determine the impact of the second cyber incident and is providing regular updates to clients.
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“We remain fully committed to resuming service and getting our dealerships back to business as usual as quickly as possible,” she said at the time.
FOX Business reached out separately to the company but did not hear back Friday.
The company’s customers include more than 15,000 retail dealers across North America.
