South Korea data center fire brings messaging services down – Strategy

South Korean President Yoon Seok-yeol called for immediate action to restart all services provided by Kakao and Naver a day after a fire at a data center damaged servers and caused an outage.

Some of the country’s most-used apps and websites, including Kakao Messenger and its online payment, gaming and music streaming services, were hit by service disruptions, some of which continued until Sunday.

The blackout has highlighted just how dependent South Korea is on Kakao Messenger. Kakao Messenger is the default communication format for many government and corporate services.

“We also ask government ministries and agencies to make every effort to ensure that Kakao and other companies can responsibly restore services quickly,” Yoon said, according to a spokeswoman.

Yoon ordered the Minister of Science, Information and Communications to provide personal assistance and called for an investigation to determine the exact cause behind the incident.

He also said that measures should be taken to prevent such incidents from happening again, including ensuring data backups and prompt reporting of accidents.

Yonhap News reported that Minister of Science, Information and Communications Lee Jong-ho visited a damaged data center in Pangyo, just south of Seoul, and said the government had systematically He said he was looking for ways to help.

The companies involved have apologized to their customers for the service interruption.

Kakao’s messenger app Kakao Talk has more than 47 million active users in South Korea and more than 53 million worldwide, the company said in an August report.