Measures are being developed to prevent recurrence of platform service outages such as the 'Kakao outage' that occurred due to a data center fire last October.

On December 29, Kakao announced a plan to support damages from service interruptions resulting from the SK C&C data center fire, established by the '1015 Damage Support Council (hereinafter referred to as the Council)'.

According to the damage compensation plan announced by the '1015 Damage Support Council', Kakao received reports of service disruption damage for a total of 19 days from October 19 to November 6, with one extension.

The council analyzed 87,195 Kakao cases, representing 83.1% of the 105,116 reported through Kakao's official channels. The majority of victims reported damages, at 79.8%, were general users, followed by small business owners (20%) and medium- to large-sized enterprises (0.2%). Among all cases, the number of damages reported for paid services was 14,918 (17.1%), and the number of cases that mentioned financial damages for free services was approximately 13,195 (15.1%).

Key details include Kakao's decision to provide three types of emoticons to general users. For small business owners, support will be provided based on their sales losses: 30,000 won for those with sales losses of up to 300,000 won, and 50,000 won for those with sales between 300,000 won and 500,000 won. Key affiliates, including Kakao Games, Kakao Mobility, Kakao Entertainment, and Kakao Pay, have also prepared support measures.

Kakao CEO Hong Eun-taek said, “This support is the beginning of a process of answering the questions society has posed to us in the wake of the 1015 disaster,” and added, “In the new year, we plan to identify and implement necessary tasks from a mid- to long-term perspective.”

Meanwhile, Kakao, which had been in emergency management following the recent incident, effectively disbanded its emergency committee on the 2nd and began normalizing operations. This comes 79 days after the committee was launched on October 16th.

In addition, former CEO Namgoong Hoon will serve as a full-time advisor to Kakao's Future Initiative Center, the company's future strategy planning organization. Kakao Enterprise CCO (Chief Cloud Officer) Go Woo-chan will lead the newly established infrastructure division, which reports directly to CEO Hong Eun-taek.

The industry predicts that Kakao will file a lawsuit for subrogation against SK C&C, where the data center was located. The scope of SK C&C's liability for damages is a key issue, and it is expected that the issue will be how to hold it accountable for the consequences of the fire in the building where approximately 32,000 Kakao servers were located.

■ Three bills to prevent KakaoTalk outages pass plenary session On December 8th of last year, a total of three bills to prevent the recurrence of the KakaoTalk blackout incident, sponsored by Representative Byeon Jae-il (Democratic Party of Korea, Cheongju City Hall District), were passed, raising expectations for a swift response to similar incidents in the future.

The main points of the bill are: △Expansion of the scope of data center protection measures obligations to include lessees [Information and Communications Network Act], △Clarification of the scope of work of domestic agents of foreign businesses such as Google [Telecommunications Business Act], and △Improvement of the system for rapid mediation of telecommunications disputes [Telecommunications Business Act].

In particular, this Kakao outage not only caused the interruption of major online services such as KakaoTalk and Naver Shopping, but it is also evaluated that the accident occurred while Kakao was renting a portion of the SK C&C data center and using it as its main server, and thus, it exposed a regulatory blind spot for data center lessees.

80% of private data centers are leased, and even for data center operators' employees, entry and access to commercial data centers are restricted, requiring the lessee to take direct protective measures. In fact, it was confirmed that the data center operator did not have the authority to manage the access control devices, access records, customer information system equipment protection, central monitoring room, CCTV, etc. inside the rental space, and thus the lessee had been managing them.

Accordingly, Rep. Byun announced that on October 17, he had proposed an amendment to expand the obligation to protect integrated information and communication facilities, which is currently only imposed on data center operators, to include lessees.

With the bill expected to be implemented as early as the middle of this year, the government and related professionals are being urged to take proactive measures to prevent the increasingly large-scale barns from causing a KakaoTalk blackout, even though it is a case of "closing the barn door after the horse has bolted."