Kakao revealed in a regulatory filing that a fire was discovered at a data centre on Saturday where the company's servers are housed. A large portion of Kakao's servers, approximately 32,000 of them, lost power due to the fire, which also caused widespread outages in the app's payment, banking, and gaming services. The South Korean corporation SK C&C provides IT services and runs the data centre in Pan-gyo.

All 53 million Kakao users, according to CNBC, were unable to access the app. Nikkei Asia stated that for more than 24 hours following the fire, tens of millions of Kakao users were unable to withdraw money, make online grocery purchases, contact cabs, or send messages to family and friends.

Namkoong Whon, the company's co-CEO, said in a news event on Wednesday, according to Bloomberg, 'We apologise for causing such a significant difficulty for such a prolonged period of time owing to our preparedness and responsiveness to remedy the problem fell short of user expectations.'

Then on Wednesday, Namkoong abruptly announced his resignation as co-CEO. Hong Euntaek, his co-CEO, will take over as the company's sole CEO.

The public's reliance on the app has been questioned in the wake of the outage. 'The government should take required actions for the interest of the people if the market is distorted in a monopoly or severe oligopoly, to the level where it serves a similar purpose as national infrastructure,' Yoon said, according to the BBC. According to Reuters, Yoon declared that the services were 'like a core national telecommunications network as far as the public is concerned' and requested an investigation into what caused the occurrence.

The majority of Kakao's systems were back online as of Wednesday, however some operations are still unstable. According to a business report published in August, KakaoTalk, the company's messaging app, has 47 million active accounts in South Korea, according to Reuters. Over 90% of South Korea's population, which in 2021 was estimated to be 51.8 million, has a Kakao account.