About 15,000 dealerships remain closed. “It's a nightmare,” they say.
June 21, 2024 in 2:30pm ET
Earlier this week, CDK Global was hit by not one, but two massive cyber attacks. What is CDK Global? Unless you work at a car dealership, you've probably never heard of the company. But you probably have, because CDK Global has a software suite used by nearly 15,000 dealerships. And now those dealerships are effectively closed.
That's because CDK's software manages nearly every aspect of a dealership's operations. When a customer comes in for an oil change or repair, a service advisor logs into CDK to create a repair order. Mechanics log into CDK to log their time and take notes on the repair. Labor, parts, all of this is processed through CDK. In some locations, employees even clock in and out using the CDK software.
“I've been in the auto industry since 2005 and this is the biggest headache I've ever experienced,” said a parts and service manager at a Kia dealership, who asked not to be named. Motor 1He gave us a taste of just how bad the situation is for dealers who rely heavily on CDK Global for their business.
“This is every aspect of the dealership. This is the software that the technicians use, and on the front end, the dealership finance group can't sell cars. This is everything that can be done at the dealership. It's as simple as coming to work every day and collecting pay for pay period.”
The initial cyber attack hit CDK Global on Tuesday, causing the company to shut down its systems “out of caution and concern” for its customers, according to the cybersecurity news site. Bleeping ComputerOn Wednesday, just after systems had started to come back online, a second attack occurred, causing another outage. As of Friday afternoon, the CDK was still down and it could take several days for it to return to normal.
In addition to service woes, new car sales have stalled because the finance department can't process paperwork, the manager said.
“You could pull out the old paperwork from the 1990s and do it all by hand, but loan providers won't accept handwritten documents. I've heard that some dealers are at least taking a deposit to finalize the sale so they can finalize the deal once CDK is back up and running.”
In the meantime, dealers who run CDK systems are doing their best.
“We log our time in and out by hand and we write up tickets for repairs,” he said. “On Wednesdays we would write down credit card numbers so we could process the oil change once the system was up and running, but we've stopped doing that. If it's a big job, we still do it, but small repairs, we leave the customer alone. We don't have pre-written work orders; that's printed through CDK. So when a car comes into the service drive, we have nothing in front of us. We can't write up a ticket, we can't look anything up.”
There has been no word on the source of the cyber attack or when the CDK system will be back online.
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