Kakao's co-CEO steps down after widespread outage at South Korea's top chat app

Key Facts

Kakao Corp’s co-CEO Namkoong Whon has stepped down, the company said on Wednesday, after an outage that shut down South Korea’s largest mobile chat app and other services, triggering widespread backlash from authorities and the public.
Most of its systems were restored by Wednesday, but miscellaneous functions remain shaky and disruptions to a wide range of services from payments to taxis and restaurant bookings have raised questions about public reliance on the app.
Hong, who is also leading the company’s response to the outage, said Kakao would look into why service recovery work was slow, prepare compensation for users and businesses affected by service disruptions and build its own data centers.
The company plans to invest 460 billion won ($325 million) to start operating its own data center from next year, and another one will be completed in the following year, it said.