"The Paradox of the Hyperconnected Society: The Premiere of the 'Everyday Stopped' Super Slow Society"

Communication, Finance, and E-commerce Platforms Halt Cause 'Digital Blackout'
Experts Say "Dominance of Specific Platform Markets Must Diversify"

On the afternoon of the 15th, an error message appeared on the smartphone Daum application in front of Building A at SK Pangyo Campus, Sampyeong-dong, Bundang-gu, Seongnam-si, Gyeonggi-do, where a fire occurred. Photo by Yonhap News

[Asia Economy Reporter Han Seung-gon] "You can replace KakaoBank with Toss, and KakaoTalk with Line!" "Let's first share the damage on Twitter!"

Due to the KakaoTalk service error that occurred on the afternoon of the 15th, the so-called hyper-connected society suddenly turned into a 'hyper-stopped society.' Some citizens suggested using Naver Line messenger instead of KakaoTalk, leading to a search for alternatives. Meanwhile, some called for a more fundamental discussion on the problems of platform services. This was a scene shown by Korean society, which has truly entered the hyper-connected era, over the past weekend. Experts advised that the dominance of specific companies in the platform market structure should be dispersed. This is because damage can also be distributed when service failures occur.

Virtually all services including telecommunications are within platforms... if an error occurs, 'all stop'

KakaoTalk is not the only platform service that has caused problems due to various errors. On August 19, 2013, Amazon.com, the world's largest online retailer, experienced a service outage that lasted about 45 minutes before recovery.

According to Fox News and others at the time, Amazon.com was down for about 45 minutes from 11:45 AM to 12:32 PM Pacific Time, preventing general consumers from accessing the website. During this incident, some users in regions including New York, Toronto, and San Francisco experienced a frozen state with error messages when attempting to access Amazon.com.

In June last year, in the United States, the content delivery network (CDN) company Fastly, which acts as an intermediary server, caused a global network outage while updating its system. Major websites of the U.S. government and other global institutions temporarily experienced access errors, and electronic payment companies such as PayPal also suffered service disruptions.

Telecommunication platforms are no exception. On December 6, 2018, telecommunications equipment company Ericsson caused a software issue that rendered 80 million mobile phones in 11 countries worldwide, including Japan and the United Kingdom, unusable. This incident went beyond simple phone outages, causing a complete halt in data transmission and mobile payments, resulting in major chaos. Last year in Japan, the top telecommunications operator NTT Docomo's network caused nationwide service paralysis for about three hours starting at 5 PM on October 14.

Similarly, the situation is comparable in financial platforms. On March 19 last year, due to the SK Bioscience IPO trading and other factors, investors flocked simultaneously, causing about 70 minutes of delayed responses when logging into M Securities' Mobile Trading System (MTS) and Home Trading System (HTS). It was reported that the surge in customers' biometric authentication login requests overloaded the authentication server.

Also, at S Securities, on January 20 last year, iPhone users experienced a 13-minute blockage of MTS access. It was revealed that terminal information involved in electronic financial fraud was mistakenly entered into the Fraud Detection System (FDS), blocking access for legitimate users. Although the market structure of financial platforms is diverse, in the event of a platform outage, nothing can be done, making this KakaoTalk incident a similar case.

As the outage that occurred simultaneously on platforms like KakaoTalk from the afternoon of the 15th has prolonged, causing ongoing inconvenience, on the afternoon of the 16th, a notice informing of a system failure was posted on an unmanned KakaoT parking pre-payment machine in Gwacheon, Gyeonggi Province. [Image source=Yonhap News]

Dense hyper-connected society platforms... failures pose threats to national security

Global consulting group Deloitte pointed out in its 2019 report "What Should We Prepare for the Coming Smart City Era?" that "In smart cities, where advanced 4th industrial revolution technologies are highly concentrated, the risk of disruption that can paralyze the entire urban infrastructure due to disasters, accidents, or even minor incidents is expected to be much higher than in ordinary cities."

Regarding the damage situation, it expressed concern that "the higher the level of underlying technology operation, the more diverse damages arise from the convergence and fusion of multiple accident causes, and due to complex damage recovery methods, if the infrastructure functions applied with smart technology stop, it is expected to be much more difficult than restoring the current national infrastructure system."

Some refer to this as a 'digital blackout.' If the hyper-connected society is shaken, it inevitably threatens individuals and society as a whole. This is why the hyper-connected society, which provides convenience in daily life, is pointed out as a factor that threatens national foundations such as the economy, society, and security when it goes down.

Experts emphasized the need to change the market structure concentrated on specific platforms. As seen in the KakaoTalk service error situation, when a platform with excessive influence in the market causes a service error, the damage is inevitably large, so the view is to disperse the market dominance to reduce the scale of damage. Professor Eunhee Lee of Inha University (Department of Consumer Science) suggested, "Since many people use Kakao services, the government should change this kind of monopoly structure." She added, "For example, conditions that allow new businesses to participate should be created or made possible."

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