Jaguar Land Rover is readying staff to resume manufacturing in the coming days, a company spokesperson confirmed to The Reg.

The cyber-stricken automaker did not commit to a firm restart date, but the spokesperson said manufacturing plants across the UK will be seeing increased levels of activity as they return to life following an extremely costly period of downtime.

Of its three main production plants in the UK, JLR’s Wolverhampton site is expected to be the first to restart business activities, with Solihull and Halewood following after.

Whenever manufacturing begins, it will likely take several weeks for all three factories to start running at typical speed.

However, it will come as welcome news for the company and its workers, and others further down its supply chain left counting the cost of the cyberattack on one of the UK’s most economically important companies.

Economists have previously estimated that each day of downtime could be costing JLR £5-10 million ($6-13 million), and the costs incurred just from downtime could in total lead to revenue losses of £2.2 billion ($2.9 billion) and £150 million ($202 million) in profit.

JLR said it shut down its systems on September 2, 2025.

David Bailey, professor of business economics at the University of Birmingham, said: “It’s one of the worst crises the company has ever faced. We’ve seen it get through the global financial crisis, through COVID, through the semiconductor crisis, but we’ve not had anything like this before, where the company has not made any cars for a month.”

To help with the company’s financial recovery, the UK government issued a £1.5 billion ($2 billion) loan guarantee at the end of September following pressure from unions and talks with JLR suppliers.

Business secretary Peter Kyle said the loan was expected to help safeguard jobs across JLR’s supply chain, which the cyberattack had imperiled and reportedly led to redundancies within days of the disruption.

Labour MP Liam Byrne, chair of Parliament’s business and trade committee, said before the government’s loan that the case for financial support was growing with each passing day.

“This is a huge cyber shockwave that’s rippled through the supply chain, and people are now losing their jobs through no fault of their own,” he said.

“That’s bad for the automotive industry. We need those skills and those people kept attached to those firms. And we can’t just have a cyberattack take down one big manufacturer like Jaguar Land Rover, and the supply chain then go down because it’s incredibly difficult to put it back together again, once things are back up and running.”

While JLR directly employs around 30,000 staff across its three main production plants, the number of jobs at its suppliers, which in some cases rely heavily on their contracts with the British automaker, is said to be north of 100,000.

Many of these jobs were put in jeopardy after JLR could no longer process invoices, leaving the small companies on which it relies for materials such as glass and aluminium uncertain about their own financial survival.

Michael Beese, managing director of metal parts supplier Genex UK, told the BBC that the majority of his 17-person team were temporarily laid off without pay as a result of the cyberattack, and there is no known date when they will return.

Jobs at other suppliers such as Evtec, WHS Plastics, SurTec, and OPmobility were affected too, company officials said in September.

Luxury carmaker Aston Martin said today it couldn’t rule out a financial impact on its business as a direct result of “the recent cyber incident at a major UK automotive manufacturer,” in a London Stock Exchange filing.

Others outside of JLR’s direct supply chain were also affected, with owners of pubs and cafes previously saying that since JLR staff were unable to work and feared for their livelihoods, they stayed at home instead of coming into work and frequenting their small businesses.

Families of JLR workers expressed concern for their partners and children, with some saying they were worried about not being able to deliver a Christmas experience in December. ®