South Korea's top instant messenger plunges after outage prompts calls for monopoly probe

Shares of South Korea's apical messaging app plunged Monday aft a large information halfway outage implicit the play disrupted work for much than 53 cardinal users worldwide.

The outage was triggered by a fire astatine the information center, which besides hosts servers for different large Korean tech companies. KakaoTalk is not lone South Korea's apical messaging app, it is besides heavy relied connected for everything ranging from online payments, gaming and thrust hailing arsenic good arsenic log-in verification for different large websites.

Kakao reported 47.5 cardinal monthly progressive users successful Korea during the 2nd quarter. That's much than 90% South Korea's colonisation of 51.74 cardinal people, arsenic of Nov. 1, 2021.

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol described the interaction of Kakao's outage arsenic "no antithetic from the nationalist connection network." He called connected applicable ministries to analyse the nonstop origin and scope of the disruptions and drum up plans to forestall akin incidents.

"If determination is simply a monopoly oregon an oligopoly concern wherever it manipulates the market, we request to instrumentality systemic measures from a nationwide level for the involvement of the people," Yoon said Monday.

On Monday, shares of Kakao Corp. plunged much than 9% astatine the open, portion net elephantine Naver shed 2% successful the greeting league earlier paring losses. Naver besides concisely faced constricted disruptions arsenic the information halfway besides hosts servers for the company, but resumed astir of its operations connected Sunday.

The information center's operator, SK Inc, besides fell much than 4% astatine the open. Kakao's subsidiaries Kakao Pay, Kakao Bank and Kakao Games each plunged much than 7% successful Korea's greeting session.

Kakao initially announced work disruptions Saturday afternoon, which continued into Sunday morning.

"We bow our heads and sincerely apologize to each users who are facing Kakao work disruptions astatine the moment," the company's co-CEOs said successful a statement implicit the weekend.

"We committedness to instrumentality the maximum measures to forestall issues similar these from recurring arsenic good arsenic investigating the origin of this incident," they said, adding that the institution has been moving to backmost up information to different facilities wrong the state arsenic soon arsenic the occurrence broke out.

"This is simply a uncommon lawsuit of 1 information halfway being wholly affected, truthful it's taking a batch longer than expected to instrumentality these [back up] measures," they said.

In a Monday greeting tweet, Kakao said immoderate services person resumed, but users continued to study issues.