Quote:Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) announced Saturday that a virus infected "a number of computer systems and fab tools." The company was quick to identify the issue, but different fabs were affected to varying degrees, which meant some were brought back online before others. TSMC said about 80% of affected machines were restored on August 5; the rest were expected to be up and running on August 6.

One day of lost productivity might not seem like much, but for companies operating on TSMC's scale, any delay is cause for concern. The company warned that it expects the issue to cause shipment delays and incur additional costs, resulting in an estimated 3% hit to its quarterly revenue. It plans to make up for missed shipments in the fourth quarter, however, and remains hopeful that it won't be too hurt by the incident.

Quote:The fact that it took TSMC over two days to solve this problem and that the company expects to take such a revenue hit implies this was a fairly serious breach. A 3 percent revenue decline might not sound like much, but we can use TSMC’s Q3 2017 revenue report as a guideline for what the 2018 decline might look like.

In Q3 2017, TSMC reported $8.3B in revenue. This implies the company believes it lost nearly $249M in revenue due to the need to scrub its systems for malware over two days. The several-day delay could impact Apple’s next-generation iPhone launch later this year, but TSMC doesn’t anticipate any major problems. TSMC has been contacting its customers individually and will work with them to set new delivery timetables and to manage any inventory concerns. The foundry is currently in volume production on 7nm chips and Apple will likely be the first customer to debut the node. AMD is also building its 7nm Epyc CPU (codename Rome) and a machine intelligence-focused version of its Vega GPU on the new process.

Quote:An estimated $179 million is wiped from TSMC's Q3 revenues due to this downtime. Although it could affect shipments of APs to Apple, impact on the inventories of Apple products could be minimal, according to market analysts. It remains to be seen if TSMC's other clients see similarly minimal impact; or if TSMC is prioritizing a trillion-dollar client.