Kakao on track to fully restore services after fire
Fire investigators arrive at the SK CC building located in Pangyo to inspect the cause of the fire, Oct 16. Joint Press Corp
KaKao, the operator of Korea's dominant messaging app Kakao Talk, has restored 40 percent of its data center's servers, an executive said Sunday, as it is working to fully repair its services disrupted by a fire.
The tech giant has restored 12,000 servers out of 32,000 at its data center in the SK CC building located in Pangyo, just south of Seoul, said Yang Hyun-seo, Kakao's vice president handling the company's relationship with the government.
"It is hard to tell exactly how long it will take before Kakao Talk and other services can be fully restored," she said at the site, citing a massive server loss.
Kakao has servers in Pangyo and Anyang, both in Gyeonggi Province that surrounds Seoul, as part of its risk management policy, but the fire, which has been extinguished, was unexpected, according to Kakao.
The fire broke out Saturday in the SK CC building, which houses the data centers of Kakao and the country's leading search engine Naver, a rare accident that disrupted both tech giants' services.
President Yoon Suk-yeol instructed officials to make efforts to ensure Kakao can quickly resume its services as he called on the company to find out the exact cause of the fire and come up with measures to avoid future disruptions of services.
This photo shows the SK C&C building, which houses Kakao's and Naver's data centers, after a fire in Pangyo, just south of Seoul, Oct. 16. Yonhap
Yoon also instructed Science and ICT Minister Lee Jong-ho to handle the matter.
Lee visited the data centers in Pangyo and said the government takes the service disruptions "very seriously" and will consider systemic support measures in case of this kind of failure in the future.
A message delivery failure and login error occurred at the country's top mobile messenger, KakaoTalk. Other service failures were also reported by Kakao's online payment unit Kakao Pay and its gaming platform Kakao Games.
Kakao-owned portal website Daum and Melon, the country's top music streaming service under Kakao, suffered a service malfunction as well.
Naver also said a partial disruption was reported at its shopping services, including Shopping Live. (Yonhap)