Kakao "About Half of Servers Recovered... Difficult to Specify Exact Time for Full Service Normalization"

Scene of the fire at Building A, SK C&C Pangyo Campus, Seongnam, Gyeonggi-do on the 16th. The fire, which occurred around 3:30 PM the previous day at the SK C&C data center, caused the 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 disruptions, resulting in a nationwide outage lasting about 10 hours./Photo by Hyunmin Kim kimhyun81@

[Asia Economy Reporter Yuri Choi] Yang Hyun-seo, Vice President of Kakao, stated on the 16th that about half of the servers at SK C&C's Pangyo Data Center have been restored, but it is difficult to say when the service will be fully normalized.

At the fire site that day, Vice President Yang said, "Currently, about 12,000 servers have been restored, and recovery work is underway on 2,000 to 3,000 more." Kakao has about 32,000 servers at the Pangyo Data Center, which serves as its main center.

Yang said, "The manual requires recovery within 20 minutes of an incident, but the amount of server loss is so large," adding, "It is difficult to say exactly how much more time it will take for services like KakaoTalk to be fully restored."

The reason the service has not been fully restored is that despite the redundancy measures, power supply was cut off, and it is taking a lot of time to expand servers and switch traffic. Redundancy measures involve replicating the same data in multiple locations.

Yang said, "Having all 32,000 servers go down is an unprecedented situation in the IT industry," and added, "There were expected risk response scenarios, but the fire was such an unforeseen scenario that we believe the countermeasures were insufficient," promising to prepare countermeasures.

However, regarding concerns about data loss stored on the servers, he said, "Since the data is stored in a distributed manner, the risk of loss is 0%."

At around 3:30 p.m. the previous day, a fire broke out at SK C&C's Pangyo Data Center, where Kakao is located, causing disruptions across Kakao's services. KakaoTalk's mobile functions did not work, and the PC version was also unavailable. Affiliate services requiring KakaoTalk account login, such as KakaoT and KakaoPay, were also difficult to use. As server recovery progresses, Kakao services have partially resumed. However, full recovery is delayed, with features like photo and video transmission on KakaoTalk still not functioning.

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