Official

An electrical fire is delaying Ford's October sales numbers

Dealers can't report sales due to a fire-induced power outage.

It's the first of the month, and that means automakers are releasing last month's sales figures. Things aren't great – General Motors is down 1.7 percent, Fiat Chrysler dropped ten percent, and Mazda is down 10.7 percent, just to name a few brands. And then there's Ford, whose sales caught fire. Sort of.

It turns out a fire yesterday at an electrical substation in the basement of Ford's Dearborn, MI, headquarters interrupted power at the Glass House and a nearby Ford Credit office, the company said in a statement. The power outage affected the main data center Ford and its dealers use to report sales each month, meaning the Blue Oval won't be reporting October's numbers until later this week.

"While battery backups worked as intended to protect data saved in the system, the lack of full power resulted in the data center being shut down for most of Monday's business day, and dealers were unable to report final-day sales," the statement said.

Analysts at Bloomberg expect Ford's sales to follow the trend of its Detroit-based rivals and drop, falling about 11 percent over October 2015. As for the fire, Ford evacuated its employees when the basement fire started yesterday morning and then sent them home around noon. There were no injuries.

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