The stock cost of Southern Korea’s internet giant Kakao tumbled on Monday following a fire at a information center that take off energy on Saturday, causing a few solution malfunctions.
The blaze on SK C&C information center, which houses the servers of Korea’s two biggest internet businesses — Kakao and Naver — disrupted Kakao’s messaging, ride-hailing, repayment and game apps, and Naver’s search on the internet and news solutions, throughout the week-end.
Some interruption is ongoing — primarily impacting Kakao’s solutions.
On Monday early morning, Kakao’s share cost dropped over 9per cent. Its peer Naver additionally slid 2per cent on opening of trading before recovering.
At enough time of writing, Kakao stated it had restored KakaoTalk, the united states’s principal texting software — with an increase of than 46 million month-to-month active users in Southern Korea by September 2022 and 53 million globally. On Monday afternoon additionally stated it had finished recovering its economic solutions. Many other solutions remain straight down.
Meanwhile, Naver, which encountered partial disruptions because of the fire on Saturday, quickly restored the majority of its operations on Sunday.
According up to a report by Bernstein, Kakao’s sluggish healing process had been brought on by the business’s insufficient owned host infrastructure and “high dependence” in the SK C&C information center. It highlights Kakao’s insufficient a well distributed back-up system. The report noticed that Naver surely could resume its main solutions quickly since it has owned host infrastructure plus well-designed backup procedure.
KakaoTalk continues to be the principal texting solution in Southern Korea while the Bernstein report predicts it’ll maintain steadily its place regardless of the outage, provided how long behind its competitors come in marketshare terms. In addition, it highlights that Kakao’s texting software is connected to other solutions including Kakao bank, repayment and ride-hailing solutions, so users are not likely to restore the software with less completely showcased options like WhatsApp or Telegram, per the report.
The 2nd biggest texting software after Kakao in Southern Korea is Twitter Messenger nonetheless it has just 3.9 million MAU by September 2022. While Naver’s messenger software, Line, has about 1.6 million month-to-month active users.
In its declaration on Saturday evening, Kakao stated the fire broke down at around 3:30 PM (regional time). It included it is investigating the problem.
A declaration by Naver on Saturday afternoon stated its alert to problems impacting its solutions because of the fire.
South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol additionally made general public feedback on Monday following event — remarking that the personal business runs KakaoTalk but explaining it as virtually a nationwide communications infrastructure. Yoon called in the federal government to research the precise factors behind the fire. “we respect business autonomy and imagination, but that’s in line with the premise your market fairly allocates resources and earnings in a method of reasonable competition,” Yoon stated. “If a monopoly situation causes market manipulation, the us government should simply take systemic action.”
