--- title: "After a widespread outage that left 53 million US users locked out, Kakao's co-CEO resigned." description: "In South Korea, KakaoTalk has 47 million active accounts, which translates to 90% of the people using the programme." author: "Muskan Singh" published: 2022-10-20 canonical: https://www.mindstick.com/news/2187/after-a-widespread-outage-that-left-53-million-us-users-locked-out-kakao-s-co-ceo-resigned category: "entertainment" tags: ["news", "entertainment industry", "entertainment", "entertainment news"] reading_time: 2 minutes --- # After a widespread outage that left 53 million US users locked out, Kakao's co-CEO resigned. **Kakao revealed in a regulatory filing that a [fire was discovered](https://answers.mindstick.com/qa/33473/how-the-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](https://answers.mindstick.com/qa/50571/why-is-my-apple-iphone-8-unable-to-access-wi-fi-internet-and-how-to-fix-it) 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](https://answers.mindstick.com/qa/104123/what-are-the-top-online-grocery-delivery-deals) purchases, contact cabs, or send messages to family and friends. Namkoong Whon, the company's co-CEO, said in a [news](https://www.mindstick.com/developersection/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](https://yourviews.mindstick.com/view/88335/why-trump-s-big-infrastructure-vision-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](https://answers.mindstick.com/qa/104490/why-is-the-national-infrastructure-pipeline-important),' 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](https://www.mindstick.com/news/2149/twitter-claims-in-court-that-elon-musk-is-the-subject-of-government-investigations) 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**](https://www.mindstick.com/news/2152/china-s-objective-to-lead-in-technology-harmed-due-to-tensions-with-the-united-states), the company's [messaging app](https://answers.mindstick.com/qa/95930/indian-army-launched-an-in-house-messaging-app-what-is-the-name-of-the-app), has 47 million active accounts in [South Korea](https://www.mindstick.com/news/4087/south-korea-s-morphing-wheel-could-revolutionize-robotics), according to Reuters. **Over 90% of South Korea's population, which in 2021 was estimated to be 51.8 million, has a Kakao account.** --- Original Source: https://www.mindstick.com/news/2187/after-a-widespread-outage-that-left-53-million-us-users-locked-out-kakao-s-co-ceo-resigned Copyright © MindStick Software Pvt. Ltd. This Markdown version is provided for developers, AI systems, and offline reading.