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Whon and Hong Eun-taek, the co-CEOs of Kakao, bow in apology to users of their service at a press conference held at the company’s Pangyo office on Oct. 19 addressing the service disruption. (pool photo)" />

Namkoong Whon and Hong Eun-taek, the co-CEOs of Kakao, bow in apology to users of their service at a press conference held at the company’s Pangyo office on Oct. 19 addressing the service disruption. (pool photo)

Kakao publicly apologized to its users for a recent disruption to its KakaoTalk service resulting from a fire at an SK C&C data center in Pangyo.

The company also said it would provide sufficient compensation to users and partner businesses that suffered losses as a result.

In a gesture of responsibility for the incident, Kakao co-CEO Namkoong Whon is stepping down from his position.

At a press conference Wednesday morning at Kakao’s Pangyo office in Seongnam, south of Seoul, Namkoong and fellow co-CEO Hong Eun-taek apologized for the extended disruption of KakaoTalk services.

“As a service that is now used by a majority of South Koreans, KakaoTalk has taken on a public service element, and we failed to fulfill our responsibilities in a way that aligned with that,” Hong said.

He also said the company would “conduct a thorough investigation of why the restoration was delayed, no matter how painful it may be, and share the findings in an objective and transparent manner.”

Whon pledged to “use this opportunity to review and renovate Kakao’s overall system, providing an environment where users can feel comfortable again using our services.”

Kakao also established an official channel that day and began accepting reports of related losses by service users.

“Based on the content of the reports, we will quickly develop compensation standards for our various stakeholders, including partners and users not just of paid services but also unpaid services,” Hong said.

“While we can provide compensation immediately for losses involving paid services such as Melon and KakaoPage, we will need to examine the reports and develop policies for losses associated with the use of unpaid services, so that may take some time,” he added.

As of 6 am Wednesday, most Kakao services had been restored. Kakao warned that “some message reading features may not work properly before traffic stabilizes.”

Advertising message transmission features on KakaoTalk Channel had also been normalized as of 3 pm that day.

Explaining the reason that it took five days to restore services, Hong said, “While there is some redundancy in our key service data and application programs, there was a lack of redundancy in terms of major developer activity and operation instruments.”

He also said, “Since we’d never had a situation before where an entire data center was shut down, we had not envisioned such a situation, and our disaster preparedness training had focused only on situations involving an explosive increase in traffic.”

“The biggest lesson from this situation has been our discovery of that lapse in judgment,” he added.

“Once operations are stabilized at the Pangyo data center, we will begin establishing redundancy for those instruments, and in the next two months [before stabilization is reached] we will be creating an environment to prevent similar incidents,” he said.

As a gesture of accountability for the situation, Namkoong stepped down as co-CEO. He plans to take on a role on the disaster countermeasures subcommittee of Kakao’s emergency committee, focusing on developing preventive measures to prevent similar situations in the future.

“Just as you don’t tend to recognize the importance of water or air in your life until they’re gone, this incident made me realize how I had been focusing all my decisions on sales and operating profits, and how I need to be more deeply interested and invest in the system aspects,” he said.

By Chung In-seon, staff reporter

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