Ministry of Science and ICT to Announce Measures Next Month to Prevent Recurrence of 'Kakao Outage'

The 4th Meeting of the 2022 Communications Disaster Management Deliberation Committee Held

On the 16th, Gyeonggi Fire Investigation officials 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, the Daum portal, KakaoT, KakaoPage, and KakaoPay experienced widespread outages, resulting in a nationwide 'blackout situation' lasting about 10 hours. Photo by Kim Hyun-min kimhyun81@

[Asia Economy Reporter Oh Su-yeon] The Ministry of Science and ICT will present measures to prevent the recurrence of Kakao service disruptions caused by the fire at the Pangyo Data Center (IDC) next month.

The Ministry of Science and ICT announced on the 29th that it decided this at the 4th Telecommunications Disaster Management Committee meeting of 2022.

Last month, a fire broke out at the SK C&C Pangyo Data Center, causing disruptions across Kakao services, including KakaoTalk. The Ministry discussed the response progress and problem analysis related to the additional service disruptions and gathered opinions from committee members on improvement measures.

The Ministry plans to announce next month a plan to strengthen the stability of digital services such as data centers and value-added communication services, reflecting the feedback collected.

Additionally, at the 4th committee meeting, the network operation management guidelines were reviewed and approved to prevent network operation errors by telecommunications operators and to improve operation management systems. The 2023 Basic Plan for Telecommunications Disaster Management, which will be a key focus next year to enhance the stability and survivability of communication services, was also deliberated and approved.

The network operation management guidelines are follow-up measures to address issues in network management and operation revealed by the KT network outage incident in October last year. They provide detailed guidance on telecommunications operators' network operation management procedures, execution and verification methods, and operation standards. Operators will be able to use these guidelines to establish and operate network operation management systems tailored to their individual circumstances.

The 2023 Basic Plan for Telecommunications Disaster Management includes tasks for disaster preparedness such as changes to critical communication facilities, designation of new facilities for next year, and plans for dualization of communication networks and power supply networks for critical communication facilities.

Due to the designation of new critical communication facilities following the expansion of 5G base stations, the number of critical communication facilities next year has been changed to 879, an increase of 15 from the previous year. Dualization of communication networks and power supply networks for these facilities has been completed at rates of 96.9% and 95.5%, respectively, as of this year. The plan is to achieve full dualization for the remaining 30 newly designated facilities next year.

Furthermore, the basic plan for next year will also promote measures to prevent network operation errors and enhance the stability and survivability of communication services, such as expanding the application of centralized control for network operation management established as a follow-up to last year's KT communication outage, and network structure improvements (layer separation), reflecting each company's implementation plans.

The Ministry of Science and ICT stated, “As the digital transformation makes securing the stability of digital infrastructure increasingly important, we will strengthen telecommunications disaster management for critical communication facilities of telecommunications operators. Taking the Pangyo Data Center fire as an opportunity, we will establish an organic stability assurance system across the entire digital infrastructure, including data centers and portals.”