According to media reports such as “Business Insider”, on July 19, due to the error in the software update pushed by the US information security giant CrowdStrike, Windows computers around the world that use its software collectively fell into a “blue screen” state and could not be used normally. Many countries’ airlines, railways, banks, etc. were all affected by this, and the services were once interrupted.
In addition, the Tesla US factory of the electric vehicle manufacturer was also affected by this incident. Multiple factory equipment showed errors, resulting in the suspension of production lines. Some production lines in Texas and Nevada were forced to shut down.
The report said that until noon on Friday, some production lines in the Tesla factory were still running, but the affected workers had not received notice of when they could resume production. On July 20, Tesla’s chief executive officer Elon Musk said: “We just deleted CrowdStrike from all systems.” and attached an AI-generated picture of “burning the CrowdStrike computer room” to vent dissatisfaction. He also commented under the tweet about this failure by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, saying that this outage event paralyzed the automotive supply chain and had an impact on the automotive supply chain, describing this event as “the biggest IT failure in history”.
On the same day, Microsoft said that there was a “defect” in the software update released by the US computer security technology company “CrowdStrike” for the Microsoft Windows system, which triggered an IT system interruption. George Kurtz, the chief executive officer of CrowdStrike, later said that a fix had been deployed, but some customers needed to manually update, which might take more time to return to normal.
Perhaps affected by this news, from July 18 to July 19, Tesla’s total market capitalization fell by 31.987 billion US dollars, about 232.54 billion yuan. As of the close of the US Eastern Time on July 19, Tesla’s total market capitalization was 762.856 billion US dollars.
Data shows that in the first half of this year, Tesla delivered a total of 837,700 new cars globally, a year-on-year decline of 6.6%. Among them, in the second quarter, Tesla delivered a total of 444,000 new cars globally, a year-on-year decline of 4.8%, which was the first consecutive two quarters of sales decline for Tesla. For reference, Tesla delivered 386,800 vehicles globally in the first quarter, a year-on-year decline of 8.5%.
Another Tesla financial report shows that in the first quarter of 2024, Tesla’s revenue was 21.301 billion US dollars, a year-on-year decline of 8.69%, which was its first year-on-year decline in operating income since 2020, and also the largest decline since 2012; the net profit was 1.129 billion US dollars, a year-on-year decline of 55.07%; and the gross profit margin was 17.4%, a year-on-year decline of 1.9%.
At present, the United States and China are Tesla’s two major global markets. On July 19, Tesla raised the prices of Model S and Model X in the United States, both with an increase of 2,000 US dollars. The Tesla US website shows that the price of the all-wheel drive version of Model S has been adjusted from 72,990 US dollars to 74,990 US dollars; the Plaid version has been adjusted from 87,990 US dollars to 89,990 US dollars; the price of the all-wheel drive version of Model X has been adjusted from 77,990 US dollars to 79,990 US dollars; the Plaid version has been adjusted from 92,990 US dollars to 94,990 US dollars. It is worth mentioning that according to the California New Car Dealers Association, Tesla’s new car registrations in California fell by 17% in the first half of this year, including a 24% decline in the second quarter, a consecutive three-quarter decline.
As of the time of writing, it is not yet clear whether the downtime of Tesla’s US factory production lines will have an impact on subsequent vehicle production.
