Toshiba chip factory hit by power outage

One of Toshiba's NAND plants is recovering from a power outage that slowed its factory operations for two days.

The company said that its Yokkaichi plant experienced a shutdown at 05:21 on 8 December. The update caused a momentary shutdown of Toshiba's NAND chip operation at the plant.

Though short-lived, the outage and the process of recovering and restarting production hampered the facility for days. Toshiba said that as of 15:00 on 10 December production at the facility had returned to normal.

"Toshiba is currently confirming the impact of this incident and will seek to minimise impacts on its customers," the company stated.

While it has not given official word on just how much the outage affected operations, unofficial estimates have NAND production being cut by as much as 20 per cent due to the incident.

The outage comes as demand for NAND memory is seen as climbing. Earlier this year, analysts predicted that demand for the memory could cause NAND chip sales to triple over the next year.

Fuelling the growth is an explosion in demand for devices such as smartphones and tablets which use embedded memory chips for onboard storage.