Clorox cyberattack leads to low supply of cleaning products

A cyberattack from August 2023 is affecting The Clorox Company supply chain. Monday, Sept. 18, the company said in a securities filing that it is aware of “an elevated level of consumer product availability issues.”

The company, known for its sanitizing wipes and brands like Pine-Sol and FreshStep cat litter, said it was hit with a cyberattack on Aug. 14. Since taking specific systems offline due to the cyberattack, operations have crawled as employees have been fulfilling and processing orders manually.

More than a month later, the company said the cyberthreat has been contained, but portions of its IT infrastructure were damaged, and repairs are in the works. The company added it is in the process of reintegrating the systems that were taken offline and expects to get back to “normal automated order processing” by the week of Sept. 25.

The timeline for when Clorox gets back to full production is still up in the air.

“We expect the ramp-up to full production to occur over time but do not yet have an estimate for how long it will take to resume fully normalized operations,” the filing read.

As for the financial impact, the filing noted it is still too early to quantify but it expects this will have a “material” impact on the first-quarter financial results.