Citizen Group in 'Meoktong Incident' Lawsuit Against Kakao: "Kakao Consistently Makes Excuses"

A civic group demanding compensation for damages caused by last year's 'Kakao outage incident' criticized Kakao in court.

Officials from the Gyeonggi Fire Investigation Department are entering Building A of the SK C&C Pangyo Campus fire site in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province. October 16, 2022 / Photo by Hyunmin Kim kimhyun81@

At the second hearing held at 2:30 p.m. on the 13th at the Seoul Southern District Court, Civil Division 32, presided over by Judge Lee Joo-heon, six plaintiffs including the Committee for the Protection of the Common People’s Livelihood (Seominwi) filed a lawsuit against Kakao for damages, stating, "It is unreasonable to require consumers to prove the damages," and criticized, "Kakao did not accurately grasp the issue and only responded with excuses."

Seominwi, along with five citizens including taxi drivers and office workers, filed a claim on October 15 last year demanding compensation from Kakao for damages caused by the 'Kakao outage' incident, requesting 1 million KRW each as consolation money. At that time, a fire broke out in the SK C&C data center building in Pangyo, Seongnam City, where Kakao's servers were installed, preventing citizens from using Kakao-related services.

Kakao formed the '1015 Damage Support Council,' which included external experts and private organizations, to discuss compensation and support measures. Kakao decided to provide compensation differentially based on the scale of sales losses of small business owners and to distribute three types of emoticons to all users.

They also rebutted Kakao’s claim that Seominwi, the plaintiff, lacked legal standing. Seominwi stated, "As a civic group participating in the trial from a public interest perspective, questioning our qualification seems impertinent," and added, "We hope the judge recognizes that we are pointing out the need for prevention and inspection to ensure such incidents do not happen again."

Kakao told the court, "We have submitted our position in writing and have nothing further to add."

With the conclusion of the arguments on this date, the court plans to deliver its verdict on August 22 at 10:20 a.m.

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