South Korea’s Kakao plunges after outage, requires monopoly probe

Shares of South Korea’s prime messaging app plunged Monday after a significant information middle outage over the weekend disrupted service for greater than 53 million customers worldwide.

The outage was triggered by a fire on the information middle, which additionally hosts servers for different main Korean tech corporations. KakaoTalk isn’t solely South Korea’s prime messaging app, additionally it is closely relied on for the whole lot starting from on-line funds, gaming and journey hailing in addition to log-in verification for different main web sites.

Kakao reported 47.5 million month-to-month energetic customers in Korea through the second quarter. That is greater than 90% South Korea’s inhabitants of 51.74 million folks, as of Nov. 1, 2021.

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol described the affect of Kakao’s outage as “no totally different from the nationwide communication community.” He referred to as on related ministries to research the precise trigger and scope of the disruptions and drum up plans to forestall comparable incidents.

“If there’s a monopoly or an oligopoly scenario the place it manipulates the market, we have to take systemic measures from a nationwide degree for the curiosity of the folks,” Yoon mentioned Monday.

On Monday, shares of Kakao Corp. plunged greater than 9% on the open, whereas web large Naver shed 2% within the morning session earlier than paring losses. Naver additionally briefly confronted restricted disruptions as the information middle additionally hosts servers for the corporate, however resumed most of its operations on Sunday.

The info middle’s operator, SK Inc, additionally fell greater than 4% on the open. Kakao’s subsidiaries Kakao Pay, Kakao Financial institution and Kakao Video games all plunged greater than 7% in Korea’s morning session.

Kakao initially introduced service disruptions Saturday afternoon, which continued into Sunday morning.

“We bow our heads and sincerely apologize to all customers who’re going through Kakao service disruptions in the intervening time,” the corporate’s co-CEOs mentioned in a press release over the weekend.

“We promise to take the utmost measures to forestall points like these from recurring in addition to investigating the reason for this incident,” they mentioned, including that the corporate has been working to again up information to different amenities throughout the nation as quickly as the hearth broke out.

“This can be a uncommon case of 1 information middle being utterly affected, so it is taking rather a lot longer than anticipated to implement these [back up] measures,” they mentioned.

In a Monday morning tweet, Kakao mentioned some companies have resumed, however customers continued to report points.