Cyberattack Cripples Car Dealerships

If you're looking to buy a car, you may want to wait a bit...

Car dealerships across North America have faced major disruptions this week.

CDK Global, a company that provides software for thousands of auto dealers in the U.S. and Canada, was hit by back-to-back cyberattacks on Wednesday. That led to an outage that continued to impact many of their operations on Friday.

For prospective car buyers, that may mean delays at dealerships or vehicle orders written up by hand, with no immediate end in sight. Here’s what you need to know.

CDK Global is a major player in the auto sales industry. The company, based just outside of Chicago in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, provides software technology to dealers that helps with day-today operations — like facilitating vehicle sales, financing, insurance and repairs.

CDK serves more than 15,000 retail locations across North America, according to the company. Whether all of these locations were impacted by this week’s cyberattacks was not immediately clear.

CDK is “actively investigating a cyber incident” and the company shut down all of its systems out of an abundance of caution, spokesperson Lisa Finney said Wednesday.

CDK “executed extensive testing,” consulted third-party experts, and restored its core DMS and Digital Retailing solutions by the afternoon, Finney said in a prepared statement.

CDK experienced another “cyber incident” Wednesday evening, Finney said in a update the following day. “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.

When that will be is still unknown. As of Friday morning, a recorded message from CDK on a hotline detailing updates for its customers said “we do not have an estimated time frame for resolution — and therefore our dealer systems will not be available, likely for several days.” Customer care support channels also remain unavailable, it said.