UK economy reportedly hit for £1.9 bn from JLR hack

A new report quantifies Jaguar Land Rover’s cyber losses. The attack’s £1.9 billion economic cost reflects six weeks of halted production and supply-chain disruption across more than 5,000 UK businesses, prompting emergency government support and redefining the financial scale of industrial cyber risk in Britain.

August’s Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) hack has reportedly cost the UK economy an estimated £1.9 billion, according to a report by the Cyber Monitoring Centre (CMC). The attack forced the carmaker, owned by India’s Tata Motors, to suspend vehicle production at three British factories for almost six weeks.

The CMC attributed the losses to halted output, delayed exports, and disruption across JLR’s supplier base. More than 5,000 UK businesses were affected, from component manufacturers to dealerships and logistics providers.

The UK government provided a £1.5 billion loan guarantee in late September to stabilise JLR’s operations and maintain supply-chain liquidity. The CMC described the breach as a “Category 3 systemic cybersecurity event” — the third-highest level on its severity scale — reflecting its nationwide economic impact.

“This incident appears to be the most economically damaging cyber event to hit the UK, with the vast majority of the financial impact being due to the loss of manufacturing output at JLR and its suppliers,” the CMC said in its report.

JLR’s facilities in Solihull, Halewood, and Castle Bromwich have now resumed partial operations, but analysts warn that the recovery process could take months. The UK automotive sector’s just-in-time production model has magnified the scale of the disruption, with one shutdown cascading through thousands of dependent suppliers.

Cyber-risk specialists say the event underlines a growing gap between cyber-insurance coverage and real-world exposure, as indirect economic effects are rarely insured. The CMC’s estimate suggests that digital threats now rank alongside energy costs and supply shortages as key risks to industrial continuity.

As JLR works to restore full production capacity, the wider economic consequences are still emerging. The attack’s £1.9 billion toll marks a new benchmark for the potential cost of digital disruption to UK manufacturing.