KakaoBank Faces Repeated App Outages During Recovery on the 17th... 184 Customer Complaints Filed

App Unavailable for 26 Minutes from 3:29 PM on the 17th
Cause Properly Identified Only Two Hours After Incident
Another 8-Minute Outage During System Recovery

KakaoBank, an internet-only bank, was found to have identified the cause of its mobile application outage on March 17 only after a significant delay, with repeated incidents of app inaccessibility occurring during the recovery process.

According to the accident report and cause submitted by KakaoBank to Assemblyman Lee Yangsoo of the National Assembly's Political Affairs Committee on March 20, the KakaoBank app became inaccessible at around 3:29 p.m. for approximately 26 minutes.

Another disruption occurred for 8 minutes from 5:30 p.m. that day. Initially, the cause was misidentified, and KakaoBank only began properly addressing the issue two hours later. However, errors recurred during the recovery process.

At first, KakaoBank explained that the outage was due to a problem with its regular program update, stating that “a program conflict occurred during an internal system change.”

Upon further investigation, KakaoBank found at around 5:30 p.m. that a configuration change to intensify app performance monitoring had increased the server load, which was the real cause of the issue. While reverting the settings, another 8-minute outage occurred.

In the materials submitted to the Assembly office, KakaoBank stated, “A detailed investigation confirmed that changes to the internal monitoring system settings were the direct cause. A second login delay occurred while restoring the original settings.”

The company added, “The monitoring configuration that destabilized the system has been restored, and the service is now operating normally. We plan to analyze the technical reasons for the service delay with the monitoring solution provider.”

KakaoBank said that there were no direct financial damages such as erroneous payments, accidental transfers, or duplicate payments due to the outage.

However, a total of 184 customer complaints were received, including those who were unable to subscribe to IPOs because they could not use the app. KakaoBank stated that specific compensation plans are under review.

Assemblyman Lee Yangsoo said, “The fact that KakaoBank, which has over 26 million users, could not even promptly identify the cause of the outage can cause great anxiety among consumers. This should be an opportunity to thoroughly review the overall system and organization, and financial authorities must rigorously verify these measures.”

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