Japan Airlines on Thursday reported a cyberattack that caused delays to domestic and international flights but later said it had found and addressed the cause.

Problems with the airline's baggage check-in system had delayed more than a dozen flights at several Japanese airports, public broadcaster NHK said, but there were no mass cancellations or major disruption.

Japan Airlines (JAL) is the country's second-biggest airline after All Nippon Airways (ANA).

"We identified and addressed the cause of the issue. We are checking the system recovery status," JAL said in a post on social media platform X.

"Sales for both domestic and international flights departing today have been suspended. We apologize for any inconvenience caused," the post said.

Earlier Thursday, a JAL spokeswoman told AFP the company had been subjected to a cyberattack.

Network disruption began at 7:24 am on Thursday, December 26, (2224 GMT Wednesday), JAL said in a statement. Then "at 8:56 am, we temporarily isolated the router (a device for exchanging data between networks) that was causing the disruption," it added.

JAL shares fell as much as 2.5% in morning trade after the news emerged, before recovering slightly. The airline is just the latest Japanese firm to be hit by a cyberattack.

Japan's space agency JAXA said in 2023 that it was likely penetrated by a cyberattack by unknown entities, but no sensitive information about rockets or satellites was accessed. The same year, Nagoya Port, one of Japan's busiest, was crippled by a ransomware attack that was blamed on Lockbit, a Russia-based cybercrime organization.

Japan's National Center of Incident Readiness and Strategy for Cybersecurity (NISC) – the agency responsible for defenses against cyberattacks – was itself reportedly infiltrated by hackers in 2023 for as long as nine months.

In 2022, the government said a cyberattack was behind disruption at a Toyota supplier that forced the top-selling automaker to halt operations at domestic plants for a day.

More recently, the popular Japanese video-sharing website Niconico suspended its services in June because it was under a large-scale cyberattack, its operator said.