Yahoo Finance South Korea Orders Support for Outage-Hit Messenger App, Portal
(Bloomberg) -- South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol ordered the government to support the recovery of full operations at the nation’s biggest mobile messenger and the top portal website after a power outage disrupted some services for hours.
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“I feel a very heavy heart for the inconvenience and damage experienced by people,” he said, according to a statement from his office. Yoon asked the science minister to personally oversee the recovery after an SK C&C data center housing Kakao Corp. and Naver Corp. servers was hit by a fire on Saturday.
Yoon also called for an investigation into the cause of the incident and for measures to prevent similar outages, the presidential office said.
The instruction by the president reflects the public outrage over the disruption to everything from communications to banking at the weekend. Services on Korea’s No. 1 messenger app, KakaoTalk, had been partially restored as of Sunday midday, while operations at affiliates such as KakaoBank, Kakao Mobility and Kakao Games remain limited.
Naver Corp., a rival tech giant that runs Korea’s biggest portal website, has also experienced disruptions in operations including news, blogging and shopping. Most are back online now, the company said Sunday on its website.
Both companies have apologized for the disruption, with Kakao’s co-chief executive officers saying the fire cut power supply to servers. Kakao said it had data backed up at sites across the nation but didn’t explain why it wasn’t able to get its emergency system running immediately after the fire.
The disruption has sparked an angry reaction from the Korean public online, with one lawmaker saying he plans a probe into the incident. It also laid bare Korea’s deep reliance on a messenger app that has allowed Kakao to expand into internet banking, taxi hailing, mobile shopping, cryptocurrency trading and even character merchandise through its growing number of affiliates.
Similar to WeChat in China or Line in Japan, the app has seeped into almost every aspect of public life in Korea since being launched in 2010 by former Samsung SDS worker Brian Kim. Government adoption has boosted its usage, with Koreans allowed to pay bills and taxes on it. The central bank has also announced its interest-rate decisions via KakaoTalk since Covid outbreaks made public events difficult.
(Updates with statement from president from first paragraph.)
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