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Remember last month when a computer outage meant that basically nobody could buy cars in America? Well now a new study has calculated the cost the cyberattack on computer supplier CDK Global could have had on the automotive industry.
A cyberattack on CDK Global left dealerships across America with no access to their computer systems last month, and now the Detroit Free Press reports that the loss in sales from the outage could have cost dealers more than a billion dollars:
A cyberattack on Chicago-based dealership software provider CDK Global that began June 19 forced CDK to shut down most of its systems across the country for its dealership customers until July 5. It left about half of the nation’s car dealerships struggling to operate, forcing some to return to the days of pen-and-paper. According to Bloomberg, the group that orchestrated the attack demanded tens of millions of dollars in ransom to end it.
The result of the attack led J.D. Power and GlobalData to forecast late last month that U.S. retail sales in June across all automakers will be about 5.4% lower than they were in June 2023.
Based on June sales results, Anderson Economic Group on Monday issued a revised estimate to its June 28 estimate, which was a prediction that dealers would experience $944 million in losses. The group now estimates that total direct losses to car dealers in the three calendar weeks of the cyberattack actually reached $1.02 billion.
Some of the sales lost during the period will be made up in the weeks following the attack, when people may have pushed purchases back to while systems got back online. However, the Free Press warns that this may not be the case for every sale lost as a result of the outage. Other customers will instead “postpone indefinitely” their new car purchases, or could go to another dealer that wasn’t hit by the cyberattack. This, the site reports, could be as a result of damage to the reputation of dealerships affected by the cyberattack.
A version of this article originally appeared on Jalopnik’s The Morning Shift.