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Investing.com -- A cyber attack on Jaguar Land Rover has caused an estimated £1.9 billion in financial losses across the UK economy, making it the most economically damaging cyber event in UK history, according to the Cyber Monitoring Centre (CMC) on Wednesday.
The CMC has categorized the incident, which began in late August 2025, as a Category 3 systemic event on its five-point scale. The attack forced JLR to shut down its IT systems and halt manufacturing operations at major UK plants in Solihull, Halewood, and Wolverhampton for approximately five weeks.
The financial impact assessment is based on JLR returning to full production by early January 2026. During the production shutdown, UK manufacturing output was reduced by nearly 5,000 vehicles per week, with each week resulting in a modelled loss of £108 million to JLR’s UK operations.
Beyond JLR itself, the cyber incident affected over 5,000 UK organizations, including nearly 1,000 tier-one suppliers and thousands of tier-two and tier-three suppliers. Many automotive suppliers have taken measures to maintain business viability, including reducing pay, banking hours, and in some cases laying off staff.
JLR announced a controlled, phased restart to operations on October 8, but the CMC notes that the recovery process will take time as systems are repaired and supply chains are reactivated.
The CMC’s loss estimate of £1.9 billion (with a range of £1.6 billion to £2.1 billion) includes JLR’s business interruption losses, incident response costs, supply chain disruption, reduced vehicle sales, impacts on service centers and logistics providers, and effects on local businesses near JLR facilities.
The UK government has underwritten a £1.5 billion loan guarantee to help provide liquidity to JLR, though the CMC analysis assumes none of this support will be utilized.
In response to the incident, the CMC has issued several recommendations, including the need for businesses to recognize operational disruption as their biggest cyber risk, strengthen IT/operational technology resilience, map supply chain dependencies, evaluate cyber insurance coverage, and for the government to define parameters for future support in similar situations.
Unlike previous major cyber incidents such as WannaCry or the CrowdStrike software failure, the JLR event was concentrated on a single primary victim, with systemic effects arising indirectly through economic interdependencies rather than parallel compromise of multiple organizations.