A senior executive will leave Kakao Corp., the company that runs KakaoTalk, the most popular mobile communicator in South Korea. His resignation follows a weekend catastrophic outage caused by a data centre fire that affected 53 million users of its messenger globally.
After the outage, co-CEO Namkoong Whon apologised and announced his resignation.
At a press conference on Wednesday at the company’s office on the outskirts of Seoul, Namkoong stated, “I feel the tremendous burden of responsibility for this catastrophe and will stand aside from my role as CEO and lead the emergency disaster task force overseeing the aftermath of the incident.”

According to a translation provided by CNBC, he declared, “We will try our utmost to rebuild our users’ faith in Kakao and make sure instances like these never occur again.”
According to the company’s website, Namkoong was chosen to be the CEO in March. During the second quarter, Kakao reported 47.5 million monthly active users in South Korea. As of November 1, 2021, that represents more than 90% of South Korea’s 51.74 million population.

According to a company filing, Hong Eun-taek, who served as Namkoong’s co-CEO and co-founder of the company, would continue to be in charge alone.
Hong bowed with Namkoong and added, “We truly apologise to all individuals who have suffered from the inconveniences during the outage.”
In the morning session in South Korea, shares of the company increased by 4% before the press conference.