Kakao Co-CEO Announces Departure After Mass Chat App Outage

The co-chief executive of South Korean mobile messenger Kakao Corp., Namkoong Whon, announced on Wednesday his departure from the company after a mass outage over the weekend left its 53 million users worldwide unable to use its services.

Namkoong’s exit came seven months after assuming the position and leaves co-chief executive Hong Euntaek, appointed in July, as the sole head of Kakao.

Namkoong apologized for the mass outage that lasted for about 11 hours, saying he felt the “heavy burden of responsibility” over the incident, adding that the tech firm will strive to restore the faith of its users.

Datacenter Fire Takes Out Kakao’s Services

Kakao’s services went offline for an extended period over the weekend after a fire at the Pangyo data center operated by SK C&C shut down 32,000 of its servers, or approximately 30% of its total.

The power failure disrupted the internet giant’s messaging, ride-hailing, payment, and game apps. The incident also disabled access to the internet search and news services of e-commerce group Naver Corp.

The outage had an immediate impact on Kakao’s home, where millions of users had no means of communicating with one another, and shop owners using its payment services were unable to conduct business. More than 650 small businesses reported sales losses due to the incident.

Kakao has announced that most of its systems and other services, such as Kakomail and TalkChannel, were back online. However, miscellaneous functions remained unstable following the disruptions to its wide range of services.

Analysts said the slow recovery process of South Korea’s no. 1 messaging app was due to its lack of owned server infrastructure and heavy reliance on the SK C&C data center, which caught fire. Moreover, Kakao has yet to have a well-distributed backup system.

The company has pledged to invest ₩460 billion ($325 million) to set up its own data center from next year, with another facility planned for 2024.