South Korea’s KakaoTalk outage shows need for regulation amid ‘entanglement’ of public, private sectors
- A data centre fire caused an hours-long shutdown of nearly all online services by Kakao Corp, including KakaoTalk that is used by over three-quarters of South Korea’s 51 million people
- President Yoon Suk-yeol hinted the government will mull introducing regulations for such online platforms, while analysts emphasised need for ‘strictly managing’
The blaze at SK C&C in southern Seoul on Saturday caused an hours-long breakdown across nearly all online services provided by Kakao Corp, including messenger app KakaoTalk, and other services such as ride-hailing, payment and gaming.
SK C&C houses the data centres for Kakao and Naver, two of South Korea’s largest tech giants.
KakaoTalk is used by a majority of the country’s 51 million people for sending texts, photos and video clips, as well as transferring small amounts of money. There are more than 47 million active users in South Korea and 53 million globally, according to the company.
The fire was put out some eight hours later, but a consequent power outage at the data centre caused more service shutdowns.
“Most functions of KakaoTalk and other Kakao services are being normalised,” an official from Kakao told Yonhap on Monday. “Some of the less popular services are still unavailable, but we’re working on them.”
Kakao Pay, a mobile payment and digital wallet service, plus Kakao Games, Kakao Webtoon and e-commerce platform Zigzag, were also fully operational as of Monday morning.
