According to a recent report from electronics supply and manufacturing blog Evertiq, production at Micron's Fab-2 fabrication plant in Taiwan's Taoyuan City was suspended on July 1 due to the malfunctioning of a nitrogen gas dispensing system that led to the contamination of wafers and equipment within the facility. DRAMeXchange estimates that Micron Technology Taiwan, also known as Inotera, has suffered a production capacity loss of around 60,000 wafer starts per month as a result of the malfunction. Labeled as a conservative estimate, this equates to around a 5.5 percent cut in the global DRAM production capacity for the month of July. So, what does the shutdown mean for consumers?

With supply down, pricing in the memory market is only going to increase (remember what happened to the hard drive market after the devastating flooding in Thailand several years back. Inotera is also a major manufacturer of Micron's LPDDR4 products used to build iPhones which means that the shutdown could impact shipments of Apple's upcoming iPhone 8.