Ministry of Science and ICT, "Prevent Recurrence of Service Disruptions for Value-Added Telecom Operators like Naver, Kakao, and Wavve"

[Asia Economy Reporter Koo Eun-mo] The government has prepared measures to prevent recurrence of service failures that occurred in value-added telecommunications service providers accounting for more than 1% of total traffic, such as Wave, where playback errors occurred in video-on-demand (VOD) content, including adult films mixed into the 'Pororo the Movie' content last January.

The Ministry of Science and ICT announced on the 1st that it has strengthened measures to ensure service stability and protect users in accordance with Article 22-7 of the Telecommunications Business Act regarding value-added telecommunications service failures that occurred in the first half of this year.

Earlier, the Ministry of Science and ICT announced the '2021 mandatory target operators' under the amended Telecommunications Business Act, which took effect on December 10 last year, to ensure the stability of major value-added telecommunications services. The target operators are companies with an average daily user count of 1 million or more and a domestic traffic share of 1% or more, including Google, Facebook, Netflix, Naver, Kakao, and Content Wave.

The Ministry of Science and ICT requested data submission and recurrence prevention plans for about 10 cases of service degradation judged to have occurred since December last year among these operators, ensuring that stable services are provided to users.

Looking at the results of measures taken for three major failures that caused relatively high user inconvenience, first, Content Wave's online video service (OTT) Wave restricted access to some VODs from January 27 to February 11, and on January 29, a scene mixing phenomenon occurred in VOD content.

This happened because during maintenance work on the Wave service, a significant number of VOD contents stored in the cloud were deleted, causing restrictions on the use of those VODs. During the urgent content restoration process, simultaneous re-acquisition of content led to mixing of digital file fragments between different contents, resulting in the scene mixing phenomenon in VOD content. Subsequently, all deleted VODs were fully restored, and the service normalized.

To prevent recurrence, the government has further segmented cloud file access permissions by department and business area so that only core content managers can delete large amounts of content. Additionally, a dedicated backup cloud storage was newly added to enable immediate content restoration in emergencies, and the internally prepared incident response guidelines were comprehensively revised.

Naver also experienced access failures such as service interruptions and delays for about 70 minutes on March 24 in some services including blogs, cafes, and news. Naver judged this as a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack on the network equipment providing these services, and restored the service by blocking attacker IPs and operating DDoS automatic defense equipment, and reported the incident to the Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA) in accordance with relevant laws.

To prevent recurrence, considering that DDoS attack methods have become more sophisticated and larger in scale compared to the past, the government ordered continuous operation of DDoS automatic defense equipment for rapid response to DDoS attacks, expansion of additional defense infrastructure, and improvement of internal guidelines for DDoS failure response.

Lastly, Kakao experienced message sending and receiving failures for some users and login failures for PC version users on the KakaoTalk service for about two hours on May 5. This was confirmed to be caused by abnormal termination of some KakaoTalk message servers due to errors during message processing, which triggered a large number of service reconnection attempts from users, causing bottlenecks in KakaoTalk connection servers.

The failure was resolved by fixing the message processing errors and urgently expanding the connection servers. To prevent recurrence, Kakao plans to strengthen pre-error verification of message servers, secure backup server equipment for rapid connection server expansion, and improve internal failure response guidelines.

In addition, the Ministry of Science and ICT plans to prepare guidelines with the industry within this year to further enhance the effectiveness and specificity of measures to ensure the stability of value-added telecommunications services. Heo Sung-wook, Director of the Network Policy Office at the Ministry of Science and ICT, said, “As the influence of value-added telecommunications services on people's lives and the economy and society is rapidly expanding, ensuring stability is more important than ever. We will continue to work closely with value-added telecommunications operators and telecommunications carriers to provide users with more convenient and stable services.”

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