TOKYO – Japan Airlines said its systems were up and running again after a cyberattack on Thursday caused delays to domestic and international flights.
“We have identified the cause and scope of the malfunction, and the system has been restored,” said the airline, Japan’s second biggest after All Nippon Airways.
The “large data attack” did not leak any customer information and safety was unaffected, Japan Airlines (JAL) said in a post on social media platform X.
Japanese media said it may have been a so-called DDoS attack aimed at overwhelming and disrupting a website or server.
Ticket sales for domestic and international flights departing on Thursday were suspended during the incident but have now resumed, JAL said.
Although the cyberattack did not cause major disruption, the airline earlier said that 24 domestic flights had been delayed by more than half an hour.
Problems with the carrier’s baggage check-in system caused delays at several Japanese airports, local media said.
JAL shares fell as much as 2.5 percent in morning trade after the news emerged, before recovering. Its stocks were down 0.2 percent in the afternoon.
Separately, a transport ministry committee tasked with probing a fatal January 2024 collision involving a JAL passenger jet released an interim report on Wednesday blaming human error for the incident that killed five people.
The collision at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport was with a coast guard plane carrying six crew members — of whom five were killed — that was on a mission to deliver relief supplies to a quake-hit central region of Japan.
According to the report, the smaller plane’s pilot mistook an air traffic control officer’s instructions to mean authorisation had been given to enter the runway.
