Dec 26, Kathmandu- Japan Airlines has reported a cyberattack on Thursday. The airline said that this caused delays in domestic and international flights but later found out the cause and resolved it.

Problems with airlines' baggage check-in systems have delayed more than a dozen flights at several Japanese airports, but there have been no mass cancellations or major disruptions, public broadcaster NHK said.

Japan Airlines (JAL) is the country's second-largest airline after All Nippon Airways (ANA).

"We have identified and addressed the cause of the problem. We are checking the system restoration status," JAL said in a post on social media platform X. "Sales for both domestic and international flights departing today have been suspended. We apologize for any inconvenience caused."

Earlier on Thursday, a JAL spokesperson said the company had been hit by a cyberattack.

JAL said in a statement that the network outage started at 7:24 am local time on Thursday. “Then at 8:56 a.m., we temporarily disconnected the router (a device that exchanges data between networks) that was causing the disruption,” the statement said.

After this news was published, the shares of JAL fell by 2.5 percent in the morning trading. Then there was some improvement.

The airline is just the latest Japanese company to be affected by cyberattacks.

Japan's space agency JAXA said in 2023 that unknown entities had entered through cyberattacks, but no sensitive information about rockets or satellites had been obtained.

That same year, the port of Nagoya, one of Japan's busiest ports, was hit by a ransomware attack. The attack was blamed on the Russian-based cybercrime group Lockbit.

The National Center for Incident Readiness and Strategy for Cybersecurity (NISC), the agency responsible for Japan’s defense against cyberattacks, said hackers had infiltrated the country for nine months in 2023.

In 2022, the government said a cyberattack was behind a disruption at a Toyota supplier. This forced the top-selling auto maker to halt operations at its domestic factories for a day.

Recently, the popular Japanese video sharing website Niconico suspended its services in June after saying it was affected by a large-scale cyber attack.