Kakao unveils measures to prevent recurrence of service disruptions

South Korea’s Kakao Corp. has unveiled a series of measures to prevent a recurrence of service disruptions after the mobile platform giant came under harsh criticism over a fire in October that forced a nationwide communication shutdown for days.

Citing the absence of a control tower for disasters and a lack of manpower handling emergencies in the early stages, Kakao executives said on Wednesday the company would set up multiple backup storage systems on all its servers.

It also pledged to spend heavily on system stabilization over the next five years by investing triple the amount of money spent over the past five years. It didn’t provide figures.

A disaster response and recovery team will be newly established, it said.

“Our top priority is to ensure a stable supply of our services,” Namkoong Whon, former co-chief executive of Kakao, said at if (Kakao) dev 2022, the company’s annual developers’ conference.

In Korea, Kakao is ubiquitous – nearly everyone, from school children to the elderly, uses the tech company’s apps from messaging, taxi hailing, navigation and payments.

Due to a fire on Oct. 15 at an SK C&C data center that houses Kakao's systems in Pangyo, south of Seoul, nearly all Kakao services, ranging from messenger service KakaoTalk to banking service Kakao Pay and traffic app Kakao T, were disrupted for about five days.

Namkoong, who stepped down after the service outage, has been serving as a co-head of Kakao's task force to set up preventive measures.

The company said it is also considering building a separate data center for servers of KakaoTalk, which has more than 43 million users in a country of 51 million people.

On Tuesday, the Ministry of Science and ICT ordered Kakao to come up with preventive measures, including multiple backup systems and compensation programs, within a month as part of a government-led probe into the Kakao service outage in October.

Write to Han-Gyeol Seon at always@hankyung.com
In-Soo Nam edited this article.