Jaguar Land Rover hack hurt the U.K.'s GDP, Bank of England says

A hack affecting British car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover has been so bad that it put a dent in the U.K.’s gross domestic product, the Bank of England said.

A cyberattack against British car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover, the country’s largest automaker, has been so catastrophic that it put a dent in the U.K.’s gross domestic product, the Bank of England said.

In its quarterly monetary policy report, released Thursday, the Bank of England said headline GDP had grown by 0.2%, less than it had projected. That slowdown was due to reduced exports to the U.S. and “disruption linked to the Jaguar Land Rover cyberattack,” it said.

The hack against Jaguar Land Rover, which began in August, has proven to be the most economically devastating in British history, said Ciaran Martin, the chair of the technical committee at Cyber Monitoring Centre, a nonprofit that tracks the impacts of cyberattacks on the country.

“What makes this incident so bad is the total shutdown of industrial production. That’s much rarer in cyberattacks than is commonly understood,” Martin told NBC News.

Jaguar Land Rover didn’t respond to a request for comment. The company first publicly acknowledged the attack on Sept. 2, saying that while the hackers didn’t appear to steal customer data, “our retail and production activities have been severely disrupted.” It then took almost four weeks before the company announced it was even close to resuming manufacturing.