Kakao repairs services after causing chaos in South Korea
Seoul, Oct 17 (EFE).- Kakao, operator of the most popular instant messaging service in South Korea and of several applications used massively on a daily basis, began operating again after a fire in a server caused anger among users over the weekend.
Most of the functions of Kakao Talk, the aforementioned messaging application, and other of the company’s most popular programs already work almost normally, a company spokesman told the Yonhap agency Monday.
A fire that started Saturday at one of Kakao’s two large server nodes in the commuter town of Seongnam, southeast of Seoul, disrupted the company’s services for several hours, which only just started to recover Sunday.
Applications such as Kakao Talk, Kakao Maps, Kakao T or Kakao Pay are used daily by millions of South Koreans to send messages, content or calls, use GPS to reach a destination, order taxis or pay for goods and services.
The level of disruption – only Kakao Talk is used by almost 85 percent of people – and, according to the most critical, the monopoly Kakao has in South Korea in the online services sector, generated anger among the millions of users who use the company’s applications on a daily basis.
The fire, in addition to calling into question the company’s ability to respond, called into question its enormous power. Kakao also owns large online music, comics and video game distributors in the country and Kakao Bank, a 100 percent online bank that is the South Korean financial services company with the largest market capitalization.
At noon on Monday (3:00 GMT), Kakao’s parent company lost 5.74 percent on the Seoul Stock Exchange, while subsidiaries such as Kakao Bank, Kakao Games or Kakao Pay dropped 4.86 percent, 2.88 percent and 3.46 percent, respectively. EFE
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