Kakao ready for complete recovery nearly 2 days after fire

All News 10:46 October 17, 2022

SEOUL, Oct. 17 (Yonhap) -- Kakao Corp., the operator of South Korea's dominant messaging app KakaoTalk, said Monday that it is working for a full recovery of its services disrupted by a fire at a data center over the weekend.

"Most functions of KakaoTalk and other Kakao services are being normalized," an official from Kakao said. "Some of the less popular services are still unavailable, but we're working on them"

Nearly all online services provided by Kakao, including KakaoTalk, suffered a massive malfunction from Saturday afternoon due to a fire at SK C&C located in Pangyo, just south of Seoul.

SK C&C houses the data centers for Kakao and Naver Corp., South Korea's two major tech giants.

The fire was extinguished some eight hours later, but an immediate power shutdown at the data center caused a server outage in Kakao's services.

Kakao said the recovery process is taking longer than expected due to a massive server loss.

Services of KakaoTalk, the most popular mobile messenger in the country of 51 million people, with 43 million monthly active users, are operating normally as of Monday morning. Some experience a slowdown in sending massive video clips through KakaoTalk.

Kakao Pay, a mobile payment and digital wallet service, Kakao Games, Kakao Webtoon and Zigzag, an e-commerce platform, are also fully available.

Eight out of Kakao's 13 other affiliates, including Kakao's internet portal Daum and Kakao T, a transportation service app, remained partially down.

According to the Ministry of Science and Technology, most of Naver's servers have also been recovered. Naver's services suffered a partial malfunction on the day of fire, but they were restored in a few hours.

"The restoring measures are under way since the power supply to the SK C&C Pangyo data center resumed at 1:30 a.m. on Sunday," the ministry said. "About 95 percent of the server is recovered as of 6 a.m. Monday."