Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. or TSMC for short, has had to deal with an unpleasant situation in recent days. According to the latest sources, the company had to announce the closure and temporary stoppage of operations in some of its factories. The reason may be a serious attack by a computer virus.
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TSMC is one of the largest global suppliers of components for electronic products, especially regarding chips and processors. Their componentny are used by large corporations like Apple, AMD, Nvidia or Qualcomm, therefore a shutdown (even if only temporary) will be a very unpleasant intervention in the next sequence of events. Bloomberg states that key devices without which production cannot continue have been exposed to the virus. Some of the factories have already returned to production, while others are expected to be unable to operate for several more days. The company says that this problem was not caused by a hacker attack.
The company was forced to temporarily close all affected factories.
The company confirmed that similar events have affected the company in the past, but so far it has never affected the operation of operational lines and overall production. Unfortunately, TSMC does not indicate which products were affected and how the subsequent replacement will be handled. This slowdown comes at a very critical time, as most companies are preparing to launch new products soon. Computers will play a key role in many of themonenty from TSMC, therefore this incident can significantly mix up the cards of the individual strategic procedures of the aforementioned companies.
In May/May of this year, the production of A12 pre chips started in the factories Apple, which should be used for upcoming iPhones. The extremely small 7nm chips are meant to save space and at the same time increase the performance of mobile devices. However, the official report does not say whether TSMC was working on these chips at the time of the virus. A delay is probably out of the question, so it is more than possible that the factories, after a complete investigation and elimination of problems, will set a more efficient pace and make up for lost time. We'll see if we get official results venuconcerning this issue from the customer companies.
