South Korea’s KakaoTalk Partially Restored After Fire at Data Center Fire Causes 11-Hour Outage

The Kakao messaging application and the Kakao T taxi booking application are seen on a mobile phone in this illustration photo March 13, 2018. (Thomas White/Illustration/Reuters)

South Korea’s tech powerhouse Kakao Corp. has restored 40 percent of its data center’s servers 11 hours after a fire at its data center caused service disruptions across some of the nation’s most used tech platforms.

Servers hosted at a data center operated by SK C&C in Pangyo, south of Seoul, caught fire on Saturday, causing outages for major platforms like Kakao and Naver from 3:30 p.m. Saturday to 2 a.m. Sunday local time.

Kakao’s vice president, Yang Hyun-seo, said that 12,000 out of 32,000 servers had been restored as of Sunday. Kakao’s chat app, online payment unit, and gaming platform have yet to be fully restored.

“It is hard to tell exactly how long it will take before KakaoTalk and other services can be fully restored,” Yang told reporters.

Kakao said it had created an Emergency Response Committee comprising three sub-committees to investigate the cause of the incident, develop disaster countermeasures, and arrange compensation for Kakao’s users and partners.

“In the next week, we plan to establish a channel to report damage and start receiving reports of damage. Based on the reported information, the company plans to discuss the subject and scope of compensation,” it said in a blog post.

Police are investigating the cause of the fire, although an initial probe revealed that electrical difficulties in the third-floor battery room of the data center building may have been the source of the incident.

The tech company’s shares dropped more than 9 percent on Monday following the incident, while shares in Kakao’s affiliates, KakaoPay and KakaoBank, plunged more than 8 percent in morning trade.

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol on Monday urged officials to ensure the swift restoration of Kakao’s services, which he described as a “fundamental national telecommunications network,” and called for follow-up measures.

“If the market is distorted in a monopoly or severe oligopoly, to the extent where it serves a similar function as national infrastructure, the government should take necessary measures for the sake of the people,” he said.

Kakao’s messenger app KakaoTalk has more than 47 million active accounts in South Korea and 53 million globally, the company said in a report in August.

Yoon said that he had instructed South Korea’s antitrust watchdog to examine the matter.

Meanwhile, South Korean online platform Naver said in a statement on Saturday that all its services have been restored.

Reuters contributed to this report.