'1-Hour Outage' Google Must Provide Korean Guidance... "Compensation Is Difficult"

[Asia Economy Reporter Eunmo Koo] The government applied the so-called 'Netflix Law (Amendment to the Enforcement Decree of the Telecommunications Business Act)' for the first time to Google, which caused a blackout for about an hour last year, and demanded system improvements to prevent recurrence. Google must also provide related information in Korean to Korean users if a similar failure occurs again. However, direct consumer compensation for paid members is difficult as the current law does not meet the criteria.

The Ministry of Science and ICT announced on the 8th that, after expert review regarding the authentication failure in major services of Google LLC last December, it has ordered improvements in service stability and user protection measures in accordance with Article 22-7 of the Telecommunications Business Act.

Previously, many Google services requiring login, such as YouTube, Gmail, and Play Store, experienced a global failure starting from around 8:30 PM on December 14 last year, lasting about an hour. Google restored the service approximately 50 minutes after the initial failure but did not recognize the problem in advance and did not provide any separate Korean-language notice.

Accordingly, the Ministry of Science and ICT required Google to secure service stability to prevent similar issues in the future. First, to prevent recurrence of the same failure, Google will improve its system to detect incorrect configuration values in advance and apply existing space recycling technology so that the 'user authentication system' can operate normally even when storage space is exceeded.

◆Cause of Blackout Investigated... Storage Space Set to 0

The cause of Google's service failure was found to be that during maintenance work on the 'user authentication system' handling user login requests in October last year, Google completed the work without allocating storage space. Although the storage space setting value should be entered as an appropriate capacity in software, it was mistakenly set to '0' at that time. The maintenance result was applied 45 days later for stability, so the failure did not occur immediately.

After 45 days, on December 14, when the maintenance result was reflected, the 'user authentication system' failed to receive storage space allocation, making it impossible to process user login requests, causing failures in Google services requiring login.

Furthermore, the Ministry re-examined overall service stability measures such as pre-inspection of facilities, server redundancy, and content transmission optimization as stipulated in Article 30-8 Paragraph 2 Subparagraph 1 of the Enforcement Decree of the Telecommunications Business Act, and required Google to improve its internal guidelines, including the purpose of the law and recurrence prevention measures in this recommendation, and notify the Ministry of Science and ICT.

User protection was also strengthened. In the event of similar failures in the future, Google Korea will notify the facts related to the failure in Korean through its blog, Facebook, Twitter, and inform Korean media. Additionally, to handle user requests, the 'Contact Domestic Agent' function was added using Google's domestic agent (Transcosmos Korea), designated last month, allowing inquiries in Korean. After a trial operation, it will be fully operated.

◆Compensation for Paid Members Not Applied... 4-Hour Standard

This is the first case applying the Netflix Law. The amended Telecommunications Business Act last year imposes service stability obligations on value-added telecommunications service providers with an average daily visitor count of over 1 million and generating more than 1% of domestic total traffic. Six companies including Google, Facebook, Netflix, Naver, Kakao, and Wavve are subject to this.

However, direct compensation related to this failure is difficult. Paid subscribers such as YouTube Premium also experienced about an hour of inconvenience during the blackout, but it does not meet the current legal response criteria. Hong Jin-bae, Director of Telecommunications Policy at the Ministry of Science and ICT, explained, “Currently, compensation regulations are based on a 4-hour standard.” The current Enforcement Decree of the Telecommunications Business Act stipulates that if a value-added telecommunications service provider causes a failure lasting more than 4 hours, it must notify users of compensation-related matters within 30 days from the day the cause of the failure is resolved.

Regarding concerns that this measure might remain at the recommendation level, the Ministry stated it will proceed with follow-up procedures depending on the level of compliance. Director Hong said, “This measure was prepared in consultation with Google. If it is not implemented, corrective orders can be issued under the amended Telecommunications Business Act, and fines may also be imposed.”

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Science and ICT received data on the failure and measures related to some on-demand videos (VOD) stoppage and content mixing issues in the online video service (OTT) 'Wavve' of Content Wave, which occurred on the 27th of last month, on the 5th, and plans to review it with experts.

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