Fire knocks out services at South Korea tech giants Kakao, Naver

SEOUL (Reuters) – A fire at a suburban data centre south of Seoul damaged servers of South Korea’s major tech companies, Kakao Corp. and Naver Corp. on Saturday, causing extensive disruption to the country’s dominant messenger service and internet portal.

The fire at SK C&C on Saturday afternoon affected the operations of companies including Kakao and Naver housed at the data centre in Pangyo, on Seoul’s southern periphery, an SK official said.

Kakao messenger and some affiliated services remained down more than eight hours after the fire broke out. Various services offered by Naver also went down partially for several hours.

There were no reports of injuries but the companies involved apologised to customers for the service disruptions. Safety precautious were preventing Kakao from resuming power supplies to its data centre, Yonhap news agency reported.

Kakao’s messenger app Kakao Talk has more than 47 million active users in South Korea and 53 million globally, the company said in a report in August.

(Reporting by Heekyong Yang, Writing by Jack Kim; Editing by Ros Russell)