Some services like KakaoTalk partially restored today,
but photo transmission is still not recovered.
About 32,000 servers at Pangyo Data Center
Recovery manual is 20 minutes after incident, but all servers are down causing delays.
Scene of the fire at Building A, SK C&C Pangyo Campus, Seongnam, Gyeonggi-do on the 16th. The fire, which occurred around 3:30 PM the previous day at the SK C&C data center, caused the services of server tenants such as Kakao and Naver to go down one after another. In particular, Kakao services including KakaoTalk messenger, portal Daum, KakaoT, KakaoPage, and KakaoPay experienced widespread disruptions, resulting in a nationwide outage lasting about 10 hours./Photo by Hyunmin Kim kimhyun81@
[Asia Economy Reporter Ji Yeon-jin] As more than a day has passed since the fire at the Kakao data center caused disruptions to services including KakaoTalk, attention is focused on the reasons why recovery has not yet been completed.
According to Kakao on the 16th, a fire broke out around 3:30 PM the previous day at the SK C&C Pangyo data center where Kakao is housed, causing failures across Kakao's services. KakaoTalk's mobile functions were not operational, and the PC version was also unavailable.
Affiliate services requiring login with KakaoTalk accounts, such as KakaoT and KakaoPay, were also difficult to use. While some Kakao services resumed as server recovery progressed that day, full recovery has been delayed, with issues such as the inability to send photos and videos on KakaoTalk.
Regarding this, Yang Hyun-seo, Vice President of Kakao, stated that about half of the servers had been restored that day, but it was difficult to predict when the service would be fully normalized.
Vice President Yang said at the fire site, "Currently, about 12,000 servers have been restored, and recovery work is underway on 2,000 to 3,000 more." Kakao has about 32,000 servers at the Pangyo data center, which serves as its main center.
On the 16th, fire investigation officials from Gyeonggi Fire Department entered Building A of the SK C&C Pangyo Campus in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, where a fire had occurred. The fire broke out at the SK C&C data center around 3:30 PM the previous day, causing services of server tenants such as Kakao and Naver to go down one after another. In particular, Kakao services including KakaoTalk messenger, portal Daum, KakaoT, KakaoPage, and KakaoPay experienced widespread outages, resulting in a nationwide "blackout situation" lasting over 10 hours. Photo by Kim Hyun-min kimhyun81@
According to Vice President Yang, the manual calls for recovery within 20 minutes after an incident, but due to the large number of server losses, it is difficult to estimate the time for full recovery. The incomplete recovery is because, despite redundancy measures, power supply was cut off, and it takes a lot of time to add servers and switch traffic. Redundancy measures involve replicating the same data in multiple locations.
Vice President Yang said, "Having all 32,000 servers go down is an unprecedented situation in the IT industry," adding, "There were expected risk response scenarios, but the fire was such an unforeseen scenario that we believe the preparations were insufficient," and promised to prepare countermeasures.
However, regarding concerns about data loss stored on the servers, he said, "Because the data is stored in a distributed manner, the risk of loss is 0%."
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