Whon Namkoong, Kakao’s co-chief executive, resigned after a fire at an SK C&C data center in southern Seoul caused a massive outage over the weekend and disrupted several Kakao services, including the messaging, carpooling, payment, banking and gambling.
Namkoong, who joined Kakao in 2015, was elevated to co-CEO in March. At a press conference on Wednesday, Namkoong apologized for the massive outage “for such a long time” and said he felt “a heavy burden of responsibility” for the incident. He added that the company will do its best to restore user confidence.
Kakao said today morning he had restored additional services like Kakao mail and TalkChannel. Most of its services are running near full capacity, with some services remaining partially unavailable.
KakaoTalk is the most popular messaging app in South Korea, reaching more than 47 million of the country’s 51.7 million people every month. The app is also used by government officials and businesses, including banks, ride-sharing services, and payment players.
Eun-Taek Hong, co-CEO of Kakao, will remain the company as Kakao’s sole chief, according to a company filing.
South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol said Monday that KakaoTalk is practically a national communications infrastructure. Kakao shares fell on Monday but rallied slightly on news of Namkoong’s departure.
Kakao’s slow recovery process was caused by the lack of company-owned server infrastructure and its “heavy reliance” on the SK C&C data center, which caught fire, Bernstein analysts said in a statement. report this week. Kakao also lacked a well-distributed save system, they added.
Hong told a press conference today that the company plans to invest KRW 460 billion (~$325 million) to build its own data center starting next year, with the aim of complete it the following year.
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