Pangyo fire and Kakao outage (2022)
A battery fire in a South Korean data center that crippled for days the messaging service used by almost the entire country.
A data center protects its servers against power loss with batteries, and since lithium-ion replaced lead-acid, those batteries are also a fire risk through thermal runaway. At Pangyo, a fire that started in a battery room led firefighters to cut power to the building, which shut down thousands of undamaged servers. The operator of the Kakao messaging service had replicated its data elsewhere, but not its administration tools, so failover did not work as planned. The event illustrates two lessons insurers find in every major outage: redundancy measured on data is not redundancy of service, and limited physical damage can produce business interruption out of all proportion to it. The South Korean government then imposed geographic redundancy obligations on major digital services.
On October 15, 2022, a fire broke out in the battery room of SK C&C's Pangyo data center; KakaoTalk, used by about 47 million people, was down for about ten hours, some of the group's services took five days to return, and Kakao's co-CEO resigned.
Follow the research
One letter a week. First, the week's underwriting note, when one is published: a dated, argued decision, signed by Paul Bernardski. Then what the observatory published on cyber risk, political risk and insurance. No account, no tracking.
No spam, one-click unsubscribe, no data ever sold.