This photo taken on Oct. 17, 2022, shows an office building of Kakao Corp. in Pangyo, just south of Seoul. (Yonhap)
SEOUL, Dec. 7 (Korea Bizwire) — Kakao Corp., the operator of South Korea’s largest messenger app KakaoTalk, said Wednesday that it will increase investment to set up multiple backup storage systems on all its servers in a bid to prevent a service outage stemming from a data center disaster.
Due to a fire on Oct. 15 at a building that houses Kakao’s data center in Pangyo, just south of Seoul, nearly all online services provided by Kakao, ranging from KakaoTalk to banking service Kakao Bank and traffic app Kakao T, were disrupted for about five days.
Kakao locates most of its servers at the Pangyo data center and has no dual coverage system to back up data in case of fire.
In an online meeting with reporters, Kakao said the company will do its best to analyze the cause of the incident as a first step and improve its system to prevent recurrence.
“We will more than triple the amount of our investment from the past five years into the service stabilizing and disaster recovery projects in the next five years,” Ko Woo-chan, who leads an emergency committee to map out response plans, said during an online session.
He did not elaborate on how much the company had spent on the sector over the past years.
Kakao said it will establish the multiplex backup system to ensure two servers can operate properly when one server is affected by a disaster.
It is considering building a separate data center for servers of KakaoTalk, which has 43 million users in the country of 51 million people, in order to guarantee stricter backup protection.
Its new data center, which is scheduled to open in September next year, will be fully equipped with such multiple response systems, Kakao said.
On Tuesday, the Ministry of Science and ICT ordered Kakao to come up with preventive measures, including multiplex backup systems and compensation programs, within a month as part of the government-led probe into the nationwide digital service outage.
(Yonhap)
