Toshiba Memory and Western Digital have revealed that their manufacturing facilities in Yokkaichi province (Japan) came to a grinding halt on June 15 due to an unexpected power outage that lasted 13 minutes. The end result? A massive loss of NAND.
The companies’ NAND flash wafer supply will be down 6 exabytes in Q3 because of the incident. This is almost half of what Toshiba and WD normally produce for a quarter.
Both companies are assessing the damage at the moment, so the financial harm of the incident is unclear. Not even counting potential damage to production tools and other equipment used at the fabs, 6 EB of NAND cost a lot of money. Furthermore, analysts from TrendForce believe that a consequence of the outage will be some loss of confidence from clients of both companies, which will have a financial impact as well.