[Asia Economy Reporter Jang Sehee] On the afternoon of the 15th, a fire broke out at the SK Pangyo Campus, where SK Holdings C&C's data center is located, causing a blackout of several services of South Korea's two major portals, Naver and Kakao, for several hours.
The fire started at around 3:33 PM in the basement level 3 of Building A at SK Pangyo Campus, Sampyeong-dong, Bundang-gu, Seongnam-si, Gyeonggi Province. The building, which has 6 floors above ground and 4 basement levels, houses servers for Naver, Kakao, and some SK Group affiliates.
There have been no confirmed casualties from the fire so far, but many users have experienced inconvenience as errors persisted for several hours in widely used information technology (IT) services, including KakaoTalk.
The KakaoTalk message sending disruption has continued for 3 hours from around 3:30 PM to 6:20 PM.
There is also an issue with logging into the KakaoTalk PC version. KakaoTalk users are expressing frustration over the 'blackout' situation.
Not only KakaoTalk, but also Kakao's portal site 'Daum' has been experiencing login failures for 3 hours, and mail, community services, news, and webtoon services are not functioning properly. Search results are displayed, but detailed pages cannot be accessed.
Some services such as KakaoPay's remittance and certain games published by Kakao Games have also been reported to have connection errors.
A Kakao representative said via text message, "Due to the fire at the SK C&C data center in Pangyo where Kakao is located, services such as KakaoTalk are experiencing disruptions," adding, "We are currently identifying the detailed scope of the disruption and are working hard for a quick recovery."
This disruption coincides with a similar incident on the afternoon of the 4th, when KakaoTalk experienced an 18-minute outage before recovery, leading to criticism of Kakao on social media.
Some services of Naver also experienced disruptions due to the fire's impact on the same day.
Naver announced in the afternoon that there was a disruption in the live commerce service 'Shopping Live,' where access to Smart Store detail pages and purchases were not functioning properly.
At Smart Store, the review section was also temporarily not displaying smoothly.
Naver stated, "Errors occurred from 4 PM and recovery is underway," adding, "We will carefully inspect and do our best to prevent recurrence and consider compensation measures for the errors."
Meanwhile, SK Holdings C&C said it will promptly normalize data center operations.
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