"Dismiss President Yoon Seok-yeol"... Google Searches Surge 1000%, KakaoTalk Delays [Yoon Seok-yeol Dismissal]

KakaoTalk Experiences 8-Minute Outage
X Dominates Real-Time Trends

On the 4th, when the Constitutional Court dismissed President Yoon Seok-yeol, KakaoTalk experienced a temporary delay immediately after the verdict.

KakaoTalk experienced a temporary outage for about 8 minutes from around 11:24 AM to 11:32 AM that day. Errors occurred on both the mobile and PC versions, such as messages not being sent or login failures.

Kakao Login Error

A Kakao representative stated, "Due to a sudden surge in traffic, some users experienced temporary delays in message delivery, but we have completed the necessary measures through emergency response."

The Ministry of Science and ICT is also investigating the exact cause, considering the traffic surge at the time of the impeachment ruling as the cause of the outage. Other than that, no major communication errors or site crashes occurred due to prior preparations by the industry.

Naver announced that no outages occurred in its major services that day. Both Naver and Kakao increased the traffic capacity of key services such as Naver Cafe, KakaoTalk, and news search by 3 to 10 times compared to normal in preparation for the surge in usage.

There was an assessment that sufficient preparations were made that day, as there had been precedents such as access failures to some services like Naver Cafe due to traffic surges during the emergency martial law declaration by President Yoon Seok-yeol on December 3rd last year.

The three major mobile carriers also prepared by deploying additional mobile base stations. To respond to the weekly pro and anti rallies held immediately after the martial law declaration, the three carriers, which had been deploying additional mobile base stations, installed 15 mobile base stations and 38 temporary base stations that day.

Real-time trends on X. X

Complaints arose on X (formerly Twitter) about interruptions in the impeachment trial YouTube live broadcast. However, it is known that no large-scale communication outages occurred.

Google and X heated up with impeachment-related search terms. On Google, the search volume for the keyword "Yoon Seok-yeol" increased by more than 200,000 searches, over 1000%, compared to five hours earlier. Many related keywords such as impeachment ruling time, dismissal, and impeachment were also searched. On X, terms like "president dismissal," "Yoon Seok-yeol dismissal," "impeachment ruling," "impeachment commemoration," "formal impeachment," and "dismissal commemoration" trended in real time, generating a strong reaction.