Anchor: A fire broke out at a data center housing servers for Kakao and Naver over the weekend, disrupting KakaoTalk, a messenger app used by about 90 percent of South Korea's population. While most of the power supply has been restored, some services offered by the two tech giants have yet to normalize.
Choi You Sun reports.

Report: Services offered by two major tech giants, Kakao Corporation and Naver Corporation, were disrupted from Saturday afternoon, after a fire broke out at a data center holding tens of thousands of servers.

The blaze started at around 3:30 p.m. at an SK C&C building in Pangyo city, where both Kakao and Naver's servers are located.

While there were no reported casualties, the nation's hyper-connected society was heavily impacted as Kakao's mobile messenger KakaoTalk, online payment system Kakao Pay, Kakao Mobility taxi app and other services were not fully restored for over 24 hours.

As of 6:00 a.m. Monday, around 95 percent of power at the data center had been recovered, with texts, photos and videos being exchanged as normal on KakaoTalk. Services like Kakao Pay and Kakao Games have also returned to full operation.

Naver also suffered some disruption on its portal website and shopping services, most of which were restored within hours.

Following their initial inspection on Sunday, the local police and fire authorities tentatively concluded that an issue related to batteries inside the building's underground electricity room caused the fire.

While authorities were expected to collect evidence for forensic analysis during their second inspection on Monday, police also found surveillance camera footage showing a spark coming off of one of the batteries at the moment the fire broke out.

Meanwhile, a parliamentary committee has called SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, Kakao founder Kim Beom-su and Naver Global Investment Officer(GIO) Lee Hae-jin to appear as witnesses for an audit session on the service malfunctions on October 24.
Choi You Sun, KBS World Radio News.