A cyber outage at retail technology and software provider CDK entered its second consecutive day on Thursday, impacting automobile dealers in Canada and the U.S., the affected companies said on Thursday.
CDK briefly shut down all its systems on Wednesday, saying it was investigating a second cyber incident that happened in the evening. CBC News reached out to the company for more information.
Spokesperson Lisa Finney said the company would not be answering direct questions for the time being.
“In partnership with third-party experts, we are assessing the impact and providing regular updates to our customers. We remain vigilant in our efforts to reinstate our services and get our dealers back to business as usual as quickly as possible,” she said in a statement.
As of Thursday afternoon, “hundreds of dealers” across Canada had been impacted by the cyber incident, according to Tim Reuss, president and CEO of the Canadian Automobile Dealers Association.
“At this point in time, there’s no resolution timeline as of yet from CDK,” said Reuss.
It remains unclear whether any customer or employee data was breached during the incident, he said.
The company provides a software — the “core piece” of a dealer’s IT operations, per Reuss — that is used to report all types of transactions made at the dealership, including the sale of a new or used vehicle, a service appointment, or the sale of spare parts.
“When that system is affected … a dealer is basically not able to operate in a normal fashion,” Reuss said.
Everything done with pen and paper in the meantime will have to be inputted into the system once it’s back up, he noted.
“Dealers are very committed to protecting their customer information and are actively seeking information from CDK to determine the nature and scope of the cyber incident so they can respond appropriately,” said the National Automobile Dealers Association, a U.S. trade group.
Privately owned vehicle dealer Holman also said the outage had impacted its phone system. Investment firm Brookfield Business Partners bought CDK in April 2022 for $6.41 billion US in a cash deal, taking the last major publicly traded provider of software to auto dealers and manufacturers private.