One Piece, Digimon Anime Go On Hiatus Following Toei Hacking Attack

One Piece and Digmon Ghost Game are being put on indefinite hiatus.

The official Twitter accounts for both anime shows confirmed that they will broadcast reruns until further notice. The announcement comes several days after Toei Animation revealed that it was the victim of an unauthorized intrusion to its private networks on March 6. The hack caused a shutdown of Toei's network, and reportedly resulted in the corruption and deletion of files related to the production of several shows. The hack also caused Toei to shutdown its online shop and take its internal networks offline for several days while it investigated the incident. Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai and Delicious Party Precure aired reruns for a week, but it appears that the damage to One Piece and Digimon's production schedules was much more severe, as the broadcasts for both shows will go on hiatus for an unspecified amount of time.

The producers of One Piece announced that it will air a selection of the best previously-released episodes from the Wano Country arc in the meantime. The long-running arc made its anime premiere in 2019 and is the fourth part of the larger Four Emperors Saga. The reruns will kick off with a re-broadcast of the recap episode "Special Episode: Barto's Secret Room," on March 20, instead of the originally scheduled 1015th episode of the series, "Straw Hat Luffy - The Man Who Will Become Pirate King."

Digimon: Ghost Game will re-broadcast its first episode on March 20 and also announced plans to air reruns until further notice. Both series are available for streaming outside of Japan on Crunchyroll.

Toei Animation was originally founded in 1948 and is one of Japan's oldest and best known animation companies. The studio has worked on numerous popular and influential series, including Mazinger Z, Dragon Ball, Saint Seiya, Sailor Moon and Yu-Gi-Oh. Some of the animation used in several classic American cartoons, including the original Transformers and the 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, was also outsourced to Toei in the 1980s and '90s.

Despite producing several of the biggest animated series in history, Toei is viewed somewhat antagonistically by some fans, as the studio has built a reputation for taking a heavy-handed approach to defending its intellectual property rights online. The studio was heavily criticized when it used copyright strikes to remove over 100 reviews and drawing tutorials by YouTuber Totally Not Mark. While Toei eventually backed off from its claims, the incident caused a massive backlash against the animation company and forced YouTube to implement new policies in regards to how it handles fair use protections on its platform.

Source: Twitter (1, 2)

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