South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service(FSS) is reportedly considering penalizing senior officials of Kakao Pay, the online payment unit of Korean tech giant Kakao Corp., for the massive disruption of services caused by its data center fire last October.
Authorities said Kakao’s backup systems failed to kick in fast enough as a result of a battery fire at the SK C&C data center in Pangyo, Gyeonggi province on October 15 last year. As a result, Kakao servers were knocked out leading to massive disruptions of 17 Kakao services including bank transactions, online and offline payment systems as well as overseas payment services.
Preliminary findings conducted by the FSS indicate Kakao made an attempt to move some of the services to the Gasan data center in downtown Seoul due to the fire, but in the end such attempts have failed. This is the main reason why it took a total of 44 hours for damaged Kakao services to return to normal.
In the wake of the Pangyo data center fire incident, FSS said it signed an agreement with the National Fire Agency to strengthen communication channels for the early adoption of preventative measures for extinguishing data center fires. This includes procuring flame retardant cloths suitable for fire suppression and removing underground level electric vehicle charging facilities to above ground.
The National Fire Agency plans to shorten the time to dispatch firefighters by utilizing shared blueprints of data centers while the FSS plans to release details of emergency training and policies within the year’s end.
Last October, Korea’s ICT Ministry vowed to step up efforts to better manage disaster prevention efforts and minimize risk for critical digital infrastructure. It had also pledged to assemble a group of specialists to develop strategies for enhancing the safety and reliability of the country’s data centers. This included advocating for the adoption of all-solid-state batteries, which pose less fire risks and satellite internet connections in case of emergencies.
