Datacenter Fire Takes Out South Korea's Top Two Web Giants

South Korea's two largest domestic internet companies, Naver and Kakao, have experienced significant service interruptions after the datacenter that hosts much of their infrastructure was shut down by a Sunday fire. The Register reports: The datacenter in question is operated by SK C&C, one of the many arms of South Korean conglomerate SK. SK C&C offers a range of cloud and tech infrastructure services, bills itself as a "total digital transformation partner" and operates three datacenters, in which it happily houses client systems. The one in Pangyo, just south of South Korea's capital Seoul, was built in 2014, covers 66,942 square meters, and boasts what SK C&C describes as "Latest/eco-friendly technology". And it caught fire on the weekend. The company has not said what cause the facility to catch fire, nor the extent of the blaze. But many services from Kakao and Naver were unavailable for many hours at a time, starting from Saturday afternoon. Impact of the outages was wide. The tweet below is an example of one business's reaction. Kakao has acknowledged the outage in a blog post that apologizes for the service interruption and slow restoration, and admits that disaster recovery efforts were delayed. The company has created an Emergency Response Committee and three sub-committees -- one to probe the cause of the incident, another to develop disaster countermeasures, and a third to arrange compensation for stakeholders. Naver's announcement admits that "some functions such as search, news, shopping, cafe, blog, open talk, and smart store center had errors." The company says all services have now been restored.

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