Why Is Only Kakao Causing Issues When Naver Also Shares Data Centers?

SK C&C Pangyo Data Center Hosts Naver, Kakao, and Others
Naver Service Restored, Kakao Partially Recovered

At around 3:30 PM on the 15th, a fire occurred at the SK C&C Pangyo Data Center, causing access disruptions to services such as Kakao and Naver.

[Asia Economy Reporter Hwang Sumi] As access disruptions occurred in services such as Kakao and Naver due to a fire at the Pangyo data center, calls for measures to respond are growing louder. In particular, major services of Kakao have not been restored for over 20 hours, raising concerns that the backup system may not have been properly established.

According to Kakao on the 16th, a fire broke out around 3:30 PM the previous day at the SK C&C Pangyo data center. As a result, access disruptions occurred in major services provided by Kakao and Naver, which were housed in the center.

In Naver's case, some areas of services such as search, news, cafes, and blogs experienced disruptions. Kakao faced disruptions across its services, including KakaoTalk. The mobile functions of KakaoTalk were not operational, and the PC version was also unavailable. Affiliate services requiring login with KakaoTalk accounts, such as KakaoTaxi (T), KakaoSubway, KakaoPay, and KakaoBank, were also difficult to use.

However, unlike Naver, which mostly restored its services, the complete recovery of Kakao's services has been delayed. Kakao announced on the 16th that some services, such as message sending and PC version login, resumed after about 10 hours, but as of 2:30 PM, functions like sending images, videos, files, and wallet services were still under recovery. They added, "We will do our best to restore all functions as quickly as possible."

Consequently, questions have been raised about the simultaneous and prolonged access disruptions across multiple services like KakaoTalk. There are criticisms that proper countermeasures, such as systems to restore service disruptions or manuals for response, may not have been adequately prepared. Previously, internet giants including Kakao have been repeatedly advised to prevent outages by operating systems distributed across Internet Data Centers (IDCs).

On the afternoon of the 15th, firefighters were busy moving around Building A of the SK Pangyo Campus in Sampyeong-dong, Bundang-gu, Seongnam-si, Gyeonggi-do, where a fire broke out. Photo by Yonhap News

In this regard, Kakao explained that it has been performing redundancy work by replicating servers across multiple data centers. However, they stated that the fire this time was a special situation. Yang Hyun-seo, Vice President of Kakao, attending a briefing on the data center fire on the 16th, said, "There was a risk response scenario we anticipated, but the fire was an unforeseen scenario," explaining the situation.

Regarding the prolonged service downtime, he explained, "Despite redundancy measures, it took a long time to expand servers and switch traffic because the power supply was cut off." According to Vice President Yang, among the 32,000 servers currently down, about half, 12,000 servers, have been restored. The rest are undergoing recovery work, and he added that it is difficult to say when the service will be fully restored.

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