Maersk Reassures Supply Chain Managers as Operations Are Restored

Supply chain managers returning to work today after the July 4th holiday have been given some good news by Maersk, which has been reassuring shippers that it has been reopening “key applications” after last week's cyber attack.

“The IT infrastructure restoration teams have been working intensively and we now have most of our main applications up and running,” said Maersk. “As promised, today we are online. However, we need to acknowledge that the journey to recover from such a cyber attack is long and complicated. Our overriding goal is to get back to an absolutely safe operation. To successfully serve our global customers we run 1,500 applications which need to be brought up one by one in the correct sequence and enable 49,000 end users across 500 locations. This all takes time, but we continue to work through it with perseverance and absolute commitment.”

The Port of Los Angeles – the nation's leading ocean cargo gateway – is also working Maersk vessels. As reported here last week, disruption to throughput was not disrupted owing to no inbound calls on the most critical days of recovery.

POLA's director of media relations Phillip Sanfield told SCMR in an interview that the “good news” was that no Maersk vessels were scheduled to call when the crisis unfolded.

Meanwhile, Maersk said that it is using “a phased approach” to restoring applications.

“In the coming days our focus remains on getting back to being fully operational across the business with the expectation to have all applications and users fully functional to serve you within a week,” said Maersk in a statement.

“We will also diligently work through the 6 days of backlog which needs to be cleared in order to give you the full transparency you expect.”

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