Kakao Corp’s co-chief executive officer Whon Namkoong resigned after a widespread outage caused chaos in a nation heavily reliant on Korea’s most popular messaging and social media service.
Kakao’s days-long outage disrupted a swath of services from banking to online deliveries across the nation, triggering a debate among policymakers and consumers about whether one company should hold sway over so much of the economy. The outage stemmed from a blaze at an SK C&C data centre in the south of Seoul on Oct 15, raising questions about whether Kakao had done enough to safeguard services used across the country by millions of users and clients from government agencies to online businesses.
Kakao will compensate users and business partners who were affected and investigate why the disruption continued for so long, it said in a statement. It will take time to assess the amount of compensation Kakao will need to pay, the company said. As of Oct 19, most services including messenger app KakaoTalk, were restored.
“We apologise for causing huge inconvenience for such an extended time,” Namkoong said in a news briefing on Oct 19, adding that he plans to stay at the company to help oversee an investigation into the causes of the disruption and the compensation drive. “We are aware that it will take a great deal of effort over a long period of time to recover lost trust.”
On Saturday, users found themselves unable to hail a ride, or if they got one, could not pay for their taxis. Millions more were unable to buy groceries, while one online user said he was charged 100,000 won (RM330) for a rented kickboard, because he couldn’t return the kickboard in time due to the outage.
The disruptions highlight the nation’s dependence on the group. Kakao has been the target of antitrust crackdowns due to its market dominance before, but the outages have since sparked discussion by South Korea’s lawmakers about possible revisions to the broadcasting communications law to step up oversight. One possibility under discussion is for the government to regulate private data centres, such as those housing Kakao and Naver Corp servers, in a similar way as national disaster management facilities.
Saturday’s blaze ignited lithium batteries and power lines needed to supply power to the data centre, Namkoong’s co-CEO Euntaek Hong said. An entire shutdown of a data centre had never occurred before, and the company had not prepared for contingencies, he said. “This was a mistake.”
Source: The Star
