Kakao co-CEO resigns after outage that hit millions caused chaos

Namkoong at a news conference in in Pangyo, South Korea, on Oct 19, 2022. Namkoong resigned after a widespread outage caused chaos in a nation heavily reliant on Korea’s most popular messaging and social media service. — Bloomberg

Kakao Corp’s co-chief executive officer Whon Namkoong resigned after a widespread outage caused chaos in a nation heavily reliant on Korea’s most popular messaging and social media service.

Kakao’s days-long outage disrupted a swath of services from banking to online deliveries across the nation, triggering a debate among policymakers and consumers about whether one company should hold sway over so much of the economy. The outage stemmed from a blaze at an SK C&C data centre in the south of Seoul on Oct 15, raising questions about whether Kakao had done enough to safeguard services used across the country by millions of users and clients from government agencies to online businesses.