"KaTalkhalge" Ten Years Already... The Frozen App Controversy Remains a 'Challenge'

[Asia Economy Reporter Bu Aeri] KakaoTalk celebrated its 10th anniversary on the 18th. Kakao considered holding an event to commemorate KakaoTalk's 10th anniversary, but due to the impact of the novel coronavirus infection (COVID-19), it decided to quietly mark the occasion without any special events. Kakao employees have also entered an indefinite work-from-home system.

◆"I'll KakaoTalk you" becomes a greeting= KakaoTalk, first launched on March 18, 2010, reached 10 million users within a year and surpassed 40 million the following year, establishing itself as the 'national messenger.' Currently, KakaoTalk has 44.85 million monthly active users domestically, and the average daily number of sent and received messages is 11 billion. The phrase "I'll KakaoTalk you" has long become a natural greeting.

KakaoTalk has expanded its services into various areas such as shopping and payments, changing lifestyles as well. Through KakaoTalk mobile vouchers, it has become easy to send gifts to acquaintances. The 'Gift' feature, introduced in December 2010, achieved a cumulative transaction amount of 1 trillion won in 2017. KakaoTalk also ushered in the full-fledged fintech era. In 2014, KakaoPay was integrated, enabling fast payments, and the 'remittance service' within chat rooms was also launched. KakaoPay surpassed 30 million cumulative users last year, with transaction amounts reaching 22 trillion won.

KakaoTalk has also created new jobs. KakaoTalk emoticons have established themselves as an industry, giving rise to emoticon artists. Starting with six emoticons initially, the cumulative number of products now reaches about 7,500. The monthly number of sent emoticons is about 2.3 billion. Currently, 2,000 emoticon artists are active.

◆Persistent 'Outage' incidents= The recurring KakaoTalk message sending and receiving errors remain an ongoing challenge every year. The 'outage incident' occurred even on the day before KakaoTalk's 10th anniversary, the 17th. From 6:43 PM to 7:16 PM that day, for about 30 minutes, message sending and receiving errors occurred, causing inconvenience to users.

This year alone, KakaoTalk errors have occurred three times. On New Year's Day, the outage lasted over two hours, causing great inconvenience to users trying to send New Year's greetings. A similar error occurred on the 2nd, causing confusion among some users working from home due to COVID-19.

Especially since many citizens use KakaoTalk, the impact of errors is significant. Each time an error occurs, it ranks first on portal real-time search keywords. Kakao also stated at a recent meeting held by the Ministry of Science and ICT to inspect the 'Emergency Response System for Broadcasting, Communication, and Internet Services in Preparation for COVID-19' that "we will ensure messenger services can be used without interruption even during disasters."

Kakao has established a preparedness system, including operating an 'emergency response mode' to cope with increased traffic, but the errors that occur every year have yet to be resolved. A Kakao official said regarding this, "We will do our best to prevent future failures from occurring."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.