Minister Im Hye-sook Urges KT to Quickly Discuss Compensation Standards

Visit to Gwacheon KT Network Control Center
Orders for Recurrence Prevention and User Protection Measures
Communication Disaster Roaming Policy Not Working

Minister Lim Hye-sook of the Ministry of Science and ICT visited the KT Network Control Center on the afternoon of the 26th and urged KT to promptly establish specific compensation standards. Photo by Ministry of Science and ICT

[Asia Economy Reporter Cha Min-young] Minister Lim Hye-sook of the Ministry of Science and ICT ordered KT on the 26th to promptly establish specific compensation standards.

On the afternoon of the same day, Minister Lim visited the KT Network Control Center in Gwacheon to check the progress of the investigation into the cause of the outage and urged KT to prepare countermeasures.

After visiting the control center, Minister Lim told reporters, "We have caused too much inconvenience to the public, and there are many people who have suffered damage, so we are taking the situation very seriously," adding, "I urged KT to come up with measures to prevent recurrence and protect users. I believe KT will carefully discuss the compensation aspect as well."

The government has formed its own 'Accident Cause Analysis Team' and is conducting discussions on recurrence prevention measures based on expert opinions. It continues to request and receive necessary data from KT.

The specific compensation standards and targets will be reviewed later by the Ministry of Science and ICT based on the plan prepared by KT. Minister Lim said, "We have not discussed the compensation standards in detail. I urged KT to promptly discuss that part from now on."

She also mentioned that the disaster roaming service policy created during the 2018 KT Ahyeon exchange station fire did not function properly. The Ministry of Science and ICT's communication disaster prevention measures announced at that time included provisions to enable communication services through other carriers if a specific carrier's network is paralyzed. Upon issuance of a communication disaster alert → according to government instructions, LTE and 5G customers of the affected carrier automatically roam onto another carrier's network → enabling voice calls, text messages, wireless payments, and internet services such as KakaoTalk.

Minister Lim explained, "The roaming service is part of the network's edge, and rules were established for the access network part," adding, "This time, the router path setting error spread to the core network and caused errors throughout the core network, so the measures created during the Ahyeon exchange station incident did not work."

She continued, "At that time, the measures were for the access network, the edge of the network, but this time the cause was that the error spread to the core network, causing problems as the error propagated," and added, "I believe measures will be prepared to prevent such problems from happening again in the future."

KT's nationwide wired and wireless internet network was paralyzed for about 40 to 85 minutes starting around 11:20 a.m. the previous day. KT initially suspected a 'large-scale DDoS attack' as the cause but corrected it to a 'routing (network path setting) error' in just over two hours. The service disruption was gradually restored from around noon, but some areas remained unstable until the 26th, the following day.