Vice Minister Park Yoon-gyu: "Kakao Service Disruption Must Be Taken Seriously... Full Effort to Develop Improvement Measures"

by Oh Suyon

Published 21 Oct.2022 11:08(KST)

On-site Emergency Inspection Meeting for Service Stability of Domestic Value-Added Telecommunications Operators

[Asia Economy Reporter Oh Su-yeon] Park Yoon-kyu, the 2nd Vice Minister of the Ministry of Science and ICT, stated on the 21st at the 'Emergency Inspection Meeting on the Stability of Domestic Value-Added Telecommunications Service Providers' that "I hope everyone present here, including those attending, painfully recognizes that it took nearly a week to normalize the service related to the Kakao service outage."

Vice Minister Park said, "Due to the fire at the Pangyo Internet Data Center (IDC) last Saturday, major services closely related to the livelihoods of the public, such as KakaoTalk, KakaoT, and Naver, were interrupted, causing great inconvenience. Fortunately, I heard today that all the services that had been suspended have now been fully restored."

He added, "This incident served as an opportunity to realize how significantly digital services affect the lives of the people and how important the social responsibility of digital service operators is."

This meeting was held to discuss measures to prepare for emergencies such as server failures of value-added telecommunications services, triggered by the KakaoTalk service outage caused by the fire at the SK C&C Pangyo Data Center on the 15th. It urgently inspected protective measures against various failure scenarios with major value-added telecommunications providers offering services closely related to the public’s daily life and sought ways to provide services stably.

Vice Minister Park said, "Since the accident, the importance of redundancy measures to ensure the stable provision of value-added telecommunications services has been mentioned several times through the media and experts. However, the government is well aware that redundancy measures are a complex issue that includes various methods ranging from server redundancy to data center redundancy, and involves numerous technical issues such as real-time synchronization and recovery time after an incident."

He requested overseas operators such as Google, Netflix, Meta, and Amazon to share their measures for securing digital service stability. Vice Minister Park said, "Overseas digital service providers also participated, and I understand that abroad, advanced responses to failure prevention and recovery are implemented, such as random infrastructure shutdown drills and preparation of response measures according to disaster situations and timings. I hope they share this know-how."

He also stated, "The Ministry of Science and ICT believes that creating an environment where digital services can be provided stably is a prerequisite for becoming a model country for global digital innovation. We will devote all efforts to preparing technical and institutional improvement measures while working intensively with the industry and experts to prevent such unfortunate incidents from recurring."