Kakao co-CEO Whon Namkoong announced his resignation today as a widespread outage by internet giant Kakao has caused chaos in South Korea, which relies heavily on the company’s services. At a news conference on Wednesday, Whon Namkoong apologized for the disruption to the company’s services and said he would resign.
“I have a heavy responsibility for this incident and I will resign as CEO and lead the Emergency Disaster Task Force to oversee the followingmath of the incident,” Whon Namkoong said. “We will do our best to restore users’ confidence in Kakao, Make sure this doesn’t happen once more.”
Another Kakao co-CEO, Hong Eun-taek, will stay on, company filings show. “We sincerely apologize to everyone who was affected during the service interruption,” Hong Eun-taek said as he bowed in apology.
A fire at the SK C&C data center in southern Seoul on Saturday caused widespread disruption to Kakao’s services, sparking public criticism of Kakao and its affiliates. The internet giant has spent hours trying to restore operations of its popular instant messaging service KakaoTalk, which is used by government officials and businesses across the country. During this period, Kakao services including payments, banking and gaming are suspended. As of Wednesday, most services, including KakaoTalk, had resumed.
