KakaoDiscuss and different companies of Kakao Corp. confronted a significant outage after a fireplace broke out at an information heart within the outskirts of the nation’s capital, Seoul (Photo Illustration by Thiago Prudencio/SOPA Images/LightRocket by way of Getty Images)
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Shares of South Korea’s prime messaging app plunged Monday after a significant knowledge heart outage over the weekend disrupted service for greater than 53 million customers worldwide.
The outage was triggered by a fireplace on the knowledge heart, which additionally hosts servers for different main Korean tech firms. KakaoDiscuss shouldn’t be solely South Korea’s prime messaging app, additionally it is closely relied on for every part starting from on-line funds, gaming and journey hailing in addition to log-in verification for different main web sites.
Kakao reported 47.5 million month-to-month lively customers in Korea through the second quarter. That’s greater than 90% South Korea’s inhabitants of 51.74 million individuals, as of Nov. 1, 2021.
South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol described the affect of Kakao’s outage as “no different from the national communication network.” He known as on related ministries to research the precise trigger and scope of the disruptions and drum up plans to forestall related incidents.
“If there is a monopoly or an oligopoly situation where it manipulates the market, we need to take systemic measures from a nationwide level for the interest of the people,” Yoon mentioned Monday.
On Monday, shares of Kakao Corp. plunged greater than 9% on the open, whereas web big Naver shed 2% within the morning session earlier than paring losses. Naver additionally briefly confronted restricted disruptions as the information heart additionally hosts servers for the corporate, however resumed most of its operations on Sunday.
The knowledge heart’s operator, SK Inc, additionally fell greater than 4% on the open. Kakao’s subsidiaries Kakao Pay, Kakao Bank and Kakao Games all plunged greater than 7% in Korea’s morning session.
Kakao initially introduced service disruptions Saturday afternoon, which continued into Sunday morning.
“We bow our heads and sincerely apologize to all users who are facing Kakao service disruptions at the moment,” the corporate’s co-CEOs mentioned in a press release over the weekend.
“We promise to take the maximum measures to prevent issues like these from recurring as well as investigating the cause of this incident,” they mentioned, including that the corporate has been working to again up knowledge to different services throughout the nation as quickly as the fireplace broke out.
“This is a rare case of one data center being completely affected, so it’s taking a lot longer than expected to implement these [back up] measures,” they mentioned.
In a Monday morning tweet, Kakao mentioned some companies have resumed, however customers continued to report points.
