Cyber incidents impact dealerships

ASHLAND Car dealerships across the country are dealing with computer system issues following a pair of “cyber incidents” involving CDK Global, according to multiple national news outlets.

The cyberattack affected at least one Ashland dealership, which will likely deal with a system outage until early next week, according to the dealer’s service manager.

Anthony Ragalyi, of Toyota Ashland, said Toyota is hand-writing tickets because it can’t access any customer information in its computer system currently.

Ragalyi said the outage occurred overnight Tuesday, so Toyota adjusted accordingly on Wednesday morning — going the old-school route of writing tickets.

“I’ve never had this issue before,” he said, adding Toyota Ashland has used CDK Global software for about four years now.

“It’s supposedly going to be back up and running by the first of next week,” he said on Thursday.

Mark Porter Ashland was not affected, but, according to a department manager there, it also used CDK Global under previous ownership.

Calls to other Ashland dealerships were not returned as of 5 p.m. Thursday.

CDK Global software is used at 15,000 auto dealers in the United States and Canada, according to multiple media reports.

A CDK spokesperson said CDK is “actively investigating a cyber incident” and it shut down the system “out of an abundance of caution and concern for our customers.”

Ragalyi assured Toyota Ashland is still able to serve customers adequately as it waits for CDK Global to operate smoothly again.