SEOUL, Oct 15 (Reuters) – A fire at a suburban data center south of Seoul damaged servers of South Korea’s major tech companies, Kakao Corp. (035720.KS) and Naver Corp. (035420.KS) on Saturday, causing extensive disruption to the country’s dominant messenger service and internet portal.
The fire at SK C&C (034730.KS) on Saturday afternoon affected the operations of companies including Kakao and Naver housed at the data center 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 apologized to customers for the service disruptions. Safety precautions were preventing Kakao from resuming power supplies to its data center, 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.
Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com
Reporting by Heekyong Yang, Writing by Jack Kim Editing by Ros Russell
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
.