'Kakao Outage' Paralyzes Daily Life, Multi-Profile Exposure Rumors... Ongoing Aftershocks

Messenger, Public Transport Use, Shopping, Payment, and Other Daily Activities 'All Stop'
Multi-profile Exposure Error?...Claims of 'Privacy Breach' Arise
Movement to Share 'Alternative Services' Also Spreads

Error message for KakaoTalk on PC.
[Image source=Yonhap News]

[Asia Economy Reporter Kang Juhee] Last weekend, a nationwide outage of Kakao's major services, including KakaoTalk, known as the "national messenger," brought citizens' daily lives to a complete halt. This incident highlighted just how heavily people rely on Kakao's services for communication, public transportation usage, shopping, payments, and games. As the Kakao service disruption continued throughout the weekend, there has been a growing movement to find alternative platforms.

On the afternoon of the 15th around 3:30 PM, a fire broke out at the SK C&C Pangyo Campus in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, where Kakao's data management facilities are located. This caused Kakao's core services such as messenger, email, blog, public transportation, and payment systems to go down. The "Kakao outage" was not resolved that day and extended into the 16th. By the afternoon of the 16th, KakaoTalk's message sending and receiving functions were restored, but major services like Daum, Kakao Mail, KakaoT, and KakaoPay remained unavailable.

◆ Office workers and drivers alike faced 'mental breakdowns'... Concerns over 'multi-profile exposure' on social media

On the 15th, when KakaoTalk, used by the majority of the population, was completely down, many citizens experienced inconvenience. Especially, office workers who use KakaoTalk as a work messenger suffered what is called a "mental breakdown." A 20-something office worker, Park, who worked over the weekend, said, "Our company doesn’t have a separate messenger, and we report weekend work in a KakaoTalk group chat, but suddenly messages wouldn’t send, so I hurriedly signed up for Telegram." Many citizens also reported disruptions in their work progress because they could not download materials or work files sent via KakaoTalk or Daum/Kakao Mail.

Those using public transportation services were equally troubled. With KakaoT's taxi-hailing service down, taxi drivers unable to receive calls were effectively out of business. Drivers using KakaoNavi and citizens checking travel information via KakaoMap, subway, or bus services suddenly lost access, leaving them stranded. One netizen lamented, "I was flustered when my navigation shut off while driving. It would have been really difficult if I were on an unfamiliar route."

On the 16th, claims spread on social media platforms like Twitter that a bug caused KakaoTalk multi-profiles (profile pictures set to be visible only to specific people) to be exposed. Posts appeared on some online communities stating "photos related to friends' private lives are visible," and there were even allegations that "affairs were exposed" due to this bug. However, Kakao clarified through its official Twitter account that these claims were "not true."

◆ 'Kakao outage' lasted all weekend... Surge in downloads of 'alternative service' apps

The unprecedented Kakao outage starkly revealed the problems of over-dependence on a single platform, prompting a noticeable shift toward alternative platforms. On social media, posts sharing platforms that could replace Kakao's services circulated widely. During the KakaoTalk outage, Naver promoted its messenger app "LINE" on its mobile main page, encouraging users to try it. As of 1 PM on the 17th, on Apple’s App Store, alternative messengers like 'LINE' and 'Telegram' ranked 1st and 6th respectively in the free app popularity charts. Additionally, alternatives to Kakao Mobility such as 'Wooty,' 'Tada,' 'Naver Map,' and 'T Map' also ranked within the top 10.

Meanwhile, Kakao is accelerating efforts to restore its services. As of the morning of the 17th, major functions of KakaoTalk, including message sending and receiving, and transmission of images, videos, and files, have been restored. According to the Ministry of Science and ICT, among Kakao's 13 major services, 4 (KakaoPay, Kakao Games, Kakao Webtoon, and Zigzag) have been fully restored, and the remaining 9 services are partially recovering some functions.

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