A top executive of South Korea’s largest mobile chat app operator, Kakao Corp, yesterday stepped down over a widespread service outage that triggered an outpouring of complaints.
Whon Namkoong, who in March became Kakao’s co-chief executive officer, said he would resign to focus on his role as the leader of the company’s emergency task force for solving the technical problems exposed by the outage, which was caused by a fire at a data center near Seoul on Saturday.
The fire initially paralyzed most of Kakao’s services, causing huge disruption in a country where millions of people rely on the apps to chat with friends, wire money and hail taxis.
Photo: Bloomberg
Critics say the severity of the outage and Kakao’s slow recovery efforts highlighted the company’s poor backup systems and its overreliance on outsourced servers.
Kakao said that most of its services were operating normally as of yesterday morning.
SK C&C Co, which hosts Kakao’s servers at its data center in Pangyo, reportedly resumed providing full levels of electricity to those servers earlier yesterday after restoring the damaged systems.
“Because of the data center fire, I feel more miserable than ever and take to heart my grave responsibility. I will step down to demonstrate Kakao’s willingness for renovation and change,” Namkoong told a news conference.
Kakao’s sole CEO is now Hong Eun-taek.
He said that the company is investing 460 billion won (US$322 million) to build in the city of Ansan its own data center, which it plans to complete within a year.
The company also plans to establish another data center in nearby Siheung by 2024.
“We have learned our lesson from the fire, and our own data centers will be built as facilities that will be safe from fires and natural disasters like earthquakes, tidal waves and typhoons,” Hong told the news conference.
Kakao’s free chat app had about 45 million active users as of April, a huge presence in a country with a population of about 51 million people, data from market analysis firm WiseApp showed.
The firm has used the popularity of the app to branch out into banking, online shopping and Uber-like taxi services in the past few years.
Its app has also been part of the country’s COVID-19 response, including reservations for vaccines and for infection tracing.
Kakao’s chat users had dropped to about 39 million during the outage over the weekend as people began using other platforms such as Facebook’s Messenger, Telegram and Naver’s Line, WiseApp said.
South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol said that Kakao’s service outage also exposed the problems of its dominant market presence, adding that the country’s antitrust watchdog was examining competition issues.
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