Whon Namkoong, the co-chief executive of Kakao, has resigned after a fire incident at an SK C&C data center in the south of Seoul caused a mass outage over the weekend and disrupted Kakao’s several services, including messenger, ride-hailing, payment, banking and gaming.
Namkoong, who joined Kakao in 2015, was elevated to the co-CEO role this March. At a press conference on Wednesday, Namkoong apologized for the mass outage “for such an extended period” and said that he feels “the heavy burden of responsibility” over the incident. He added that the company will do its best to restore the faith of users.
Kakao said today morning it had restored additional services like Kakao mail and TalkChannel. Most of its services are in almost full operation, with some remaining partially down.
KakaoTalk is the most popular messaging app in South Korea, reaching over 47 million of the nation’s 51.7 million population each month. The app is also used by government officials and businesses, including banks, ride-hailing services, and payment players.
Eun-Taek Hong, co-CEO of Kakao, who led the firm alongside Namkoong and is currently leading Kakao’s emergency taskforce team, will remain the firm as the sole head of Kakao, per a company filing.
South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol said on Monday that KakaoTalk is practically a national communications infrastructure. Shares of Kakao tumbled on Monday but recovered slightly on Namkoong’s departure announcement.
Kakao’s slow recovery process was caused by the company’s lack of owned server infrastructure and “high dependence” on the SK C&C data center, which caught fire, analysts at Bernstein said in a report this week. Kakao also didn’t have a well-distributed backup system, they added.
Hong said at a press conference today that the company plans to invest 460 billion KRW (~$325 million) to build its own data center from next year, aiming to complete it in the following year.
Kakao co-CEO resigns after fire incident that caused mass outage by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch
