South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol yesterday called for swift measures to resume all services offered by Kakao Corp and Naver Corp, a day after a fire at a data center damaged their servers and caused outages.
Service disruptions, some of which continued into yesterday, hit some of the country’s most-used apps and Web sites, including KakaoTalk and the company’s online payment, gaming and music streaming services.
The outages highlighted how reliant South Korea is on the messenger app, which is the default form of communication for many government and business services.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“We ask that government ministries also make every effort to ensure that Kakao and others can responsibly and promptly restore services,” Yoon’s spokeswoman quoted him as saying.
Yoon ordered South Korean Minister of Science and Information Communication Technology Lee Jong-ho to provide personal support, and called for an investigation to identify the exact cause of the incident.
He also said measures should be taken to prevent such an incident from happening again, including ensuring data were backed up and accidents were reported quickly.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Lee visited the damaged data center in Pangyo, just south of Seoul, and said the South Korean government would look for systemic support measures in case of another failure of this kind, Yonhap news agency reported.
The companies involved apologized for the service disruptions.
KakaoTalk has more than 47 million active users in South Korea and 53 million globally, the company said in a report in August.
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