Yoon Orders "Situation Room Minister-Led Elevation" Regarding Kakao and Naver Outage

President Yoon Orders "Institutionalization Including Cause Identification and Installation of Twin Data Centers"

[Image source=Yonhap News]

[Asia Economy Reporter Ki-min Lee] President Yoon Suk-yeol ordered government ministries to "take full responsibility and make efforts to restore services quickly" in relation to the service disruptions of Kakao, Naver, and others that occurred this weekend.

On the 16th, President Yoon said, "We feel very seriously about the inconvenience and damage our citizens are experiencing due to the suspension of digital value-added services such as Kakao and Naver," according to a press release from Chief Public Relations Officer Kim Eun-hye.

President Yoon also instructed, "Not only must the cause be identified, but thorough measures must be taken to prevent accidents, including the installation of twin data centers (data center dualization), as well as establishing systems for reporting and responding to incidents. I hope the current situation room, led by the Ministry of Science and ICT's director general, will be elevated to be chaired by the minister for command and control."

Regarding this, Chief Kim explained, "After instructing Minister Lee Jong-ho of the Ministry of Science and ICT to respond swiftly yesterday, the president additionally ordered a minister-chaired on-site meeting today to minimize public inconvenience."

A fire that broke out the previous day at the SK C&C Pangyo Data Center in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province caused service disruptions for Kakao, Naver, and others. In particular, Kakao announced that at around 1:31 a.m. on the same day, it had restored some message sending and receiving functions of KakaoTalk, the messenger application used by the vast majority of the entire nation, but not all services have been fully normalized.

Minister Lee inspected the Kakao data center fire site at the SK C&C Pangyo Campus in the morning and held a meeting. He stated that the government is taking this situation very seriously and will make institutional improvements.

On the 16th, fire investigation officials from Gyeonggi Fire Department entered Building A of the SK C&C Pangyo Campus in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, where a fire had occurred. The fire broke out at the SK C&C data center around 3:30 PM the previous day, causing services of server tenants such as Kakao and Naver to go down one after another. In particular, Kakao services including KakaoTalk messenger, portal Daum, KakaoT, KakaoPage, and KakaoPay experienced widespread outages, resulting in a nationwide 'blackout situation' lasting over 10 hours. Photo by Kim Hyun-min kimhyun81@

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