Whon Namkoong, Kakao's co-CEO has officially stepped down from his post after a fire broke out and hit its data center. The incident has reportedly disrupted 53 million users around the world, causing the worst outage in the history of the South Korean messaging app.
Kakao Top Executive Resigns After the Massive Outage
(Photo : Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images)
As CNBC reports, Namkoong Whon announced that he will be resigning as the current co-CEO of Kakao following the outage that happened over the weekend.
Before his resignation, Whon issued an apology for the affected users of the service disruption.
"I feel the heavy burden of responsibility over this incident and will step down from my position as CEO and lead the emergency disaster task force overseeing the aftermath of the incident," Namkoong said at a press conference on Wednesday, Oct. 19.
Whon said that they will do their best to restore their users' faith to the messaging app. He added that the company will make sure that this case won't happen again in the future.
Per the official website of Kakao, Namkoong just became a CEO of the company last March. At that time, about 47.5 million users of the app were recorded in Q2 2022 of the year.
For now, Kakao confirms that Hong Eun-taek will be the sole co-CEO of the company as Whon leaves after the unfortunate series of events.
Ahead of the announcement, Kakao saw a 4% increase in its shares in the morning. A day after the outage happened, the company's shares plunged to about 10%.
Related Article: KakaoTalk's Shares Decline Following Outage Which Hits Over 53 Million Global Users
Kakao Class Action Lawuit
South Korean newspaper Korea Times reports that Kakao is currently dealing with tons of criticisms from the community after the major outage occurred lately.
The regulators and users want the authorities to launch a probe on the case against the IT tech giant. Kakao is monopolizing the industry in South Korea and many people want to file a class action lawsuit against it.
It should be noted that the same report notes that the outage affected 134 services across the platform. Some Kakao users are looking for another service provider at the moment.
Naver, another IT giant in the country, saw an increase in the numbers of LINE users on Saturday. It immediately tripled after the Kakao incident.
According to an industry watcher, people are complaining that Kakao is not useful now. Since the market is diverse and it offers various services similar to KakaoTalk, some users consider switching services because they do not want to waste their time anymore.
In addition, the Fair Trade Commission or FTC said that there's a separate investigation that will probe the monopoly abuse of Kakao locally. Authorities said that they will focus on exploring the market dominance of the company.
This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by Joseph Henry
