Kakaotalk, the most popular messenger app in South Korea, had its service disrupted by a server outage caused by the fire. Following the incident, the company sees a plunge in its shares.
KakaoTalk Hit by Data Center Outage
As The Korea Herald reported, Kakao suffered its worst outage in history last Sunday, Oct. 16. At the time, the fire had engulfed the data center and there was nothing to recover from the event.
Kakaotalk is not only limited to online messaging services. The application also serves as a one-stop app for every South Korean when it comes to gaming, online payment, and more.
According to South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, the recent outage that hit Kakao was "no different from the national communication network." He urged the authorities to launch a probe about the case and how it all started that day.
"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 said.
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Kakao Shares Drop in an Instant
Following the mishap, Kakao immediately learned that its shares had quickly dropped by over 9% in the same trading day. Meanwhile, internet service provider Naver saw a 2% decline in its shares in the morning. The company resumed its operations a day later.
Kakao Games, Kakao Pay, and Kakao Bank which are all subsidiaries of Kakao witnessed a decline in shares which account to almost 8%.
In a statement, the co-CEOs of Kakao issued an apology to all Kakao users who struggled to access the apps at that time. The co-founders said that they vowed to address maximum measures so they would prevent the similar issues that could happen in the future.
Additionally, the executives were aware that this was a "rare" case because one data center was seriously hit by the outage. Because of this, restoring the system might take a long time.
Per Kakao's VP Yang Hyun-seo, the normal outage can be restored in just less than 20 minutes. However, the recent incident was so massive that they could not say the exact time for its fix.
Yang added that the Pangyo data center is the company's main data facility which houses roughly 32,000 servers. However, only 12,000 servers have been restored at that time.
The data center outage is the third incident that hit KakaoTalk this year. It reportedly lasted for almost 10 hours, making it the longest-ever system malfunction that happened since 2002, the launch year of the messaging app in South Korea, per CNBC.
KakaoTalk has established a monopoly when it comes to its service. Out of 52 million people in the country, 45.6 million users have been using the app up to this day.
This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by Joseph Henry
