제 16 호 Kakao Group Bursting Into Flames Froze Entire Country
Heavily Relying on Single Company is Convenient and Cheap, but Risky
Kakao Group Bursting Into Flames Froze Entire Country
Heavily Relying on Single Company is Convenient and Cheap, but Risky
Do-Hyuk Kim, Reporter
Kakao, a company named after an ingredient of chocolate, is one of the biggest companies in South Korea. First founded as a messaging app provider, Kakao group now spans hundreds of services that relate to social commerce and small businesses. Even though they have enlarged their field of business by intruding small businesses such as hair shop and taxi over the years, their main business is still widely known as the messaging service named ‘KakaoTalk.’ It was not the first time for Kakao to face issues in their servicing of KakaoTalk, but the recent shutdown recorded the biggest and longest shutdown since Kakao first launched their service back in 2010. The shutdown affected services linked directly to Kakao’s services, which made some businesses unable to collect reservations or contact customers. Even some government agencies were under influence of this issue, leading us to rethink about over-relying on a sole company might threaten commerce or our daily lives. Since Kakao’s invasion on almost everything is at its climax, it would be timely to view this issue and consider some solutions.
Complete shutdown on Kakao’s services happened on October 15th. Starting from Kakao’s representative service KakaoTalk failing to receive and send messages, almost all service linked to Kakao’s server located in Pangyo ran out of juice. The shutdown was caused by a fire in the SK IDC data center, which switched server’s status to down. Naver, the competitive company of Kakao, was also partially affected by this fire, but impact was much minute and recovery was done in a few hours. Kakao, on the other hand, failed to recover all of their services back into action during the entire weekend – which is catastrophically long considering the shutdown first occurred on Saturday and companies like Kakao lose a significant amount of money every minute when their services are not active.
The main reason why a time gap of recovery between Kakao and Naver appeared is because Naver split their links of their dozens of services into several server channels, and Kakao only managed to focus all of their services into one server. When they detected breach in their services, Naver quickly switched to another data center they have established in Chuncheon a few years ago, called ‘Gak.’ As a social networking service provider, Naver prepared for these kinds of issues earlier on. Kakao, on the other hand, did not prepare a dedicated data center separately for emergency situations in order to save cost, which came at a cost on occasions like this. Because Kakao had no chance to replace their temporarily deceased server thanks to their efforts of cost saving, nearly all of Kakao’s services needed to wait until the fire in their only data center was put out. Then they asked all of their engineers to come back to the office and data center to focus on recovery, which again, takes much time. At the end of Sunday, they finally made a partial comeback, but it took another four days to get everything recovered.
This shutdown damaged not only Kakao’s earnings, but customers and small business owners that relied on Kakao’s services too. For example, Kakao is one of the leading companies that provides service connecting between taxi drivers and customers, called Kakao T. Taxi drivers receive requests from customers via Kakao T, and customers could easily call for a ride whenever they needed. Due to Kakao T’s deficit, taxi drivers went back in time when they manually stopped by people requesting taxis in urban areas. Taxi drivers claimed a significant amount of drop of their income during that weekend because Kakao T was out of service. People who occasionally took taxis also complained it was much harder to grab a taxi without Kakao T, even though there are services that can replace Kakao T like TMAP taxi.
Inconvenience did not stop there. KakaoTalk contains service which users can present vouchers and mobile vouchers registered to Kakao. Because those gifts are registered to Kakao, which was out of service during that weekend, people who have those received mobile vouchers could not use them at the time they hoped while Kakao went down. Even government agencies such as the Military Manpower Administration, that send notifications via KakaoTalk failed to send alarms to relevant young people. The entire country and society almost were out of business in the first few days of Kakao’s shutdown.
This warns us how relying on a single platform could be dangerous. Platform providing companies recently made impressive growth, by supplying convenience to both customers and business owners. Public offices also improved their workflow by adopting and integrating those services into collecting petitions. They entice new customers suggesting to first enjoy how their services improve their lives, and then lock them in by aggressive promotions. Fairytale keeps on until those services go pop or ask for unexpectedly high commissions. If service goes down like last October’s Kakao, then our daily lives encounter a giant wall immediately, and it is too late to evade from issues otherwise.
In order to be a smart consumer, we should avoid being trapped in a single service even if it would require some additional efforts of searching and thinking. Local business owners should especially be careful what they wish for when it comes to run business easily utilizing those platform providers’ services. The key that gives an accessibility to fundamentals of your business should be at your hand, not consigned to others. Members of the entire society – customers, business owners, government offices and Kakao – all paid off expensive commissions this time to learn this lesson. It is fine to make a mistake at first, but it should not be repeated next time.
