Alphabiz - KakaoBank App Outage Occurred Twice Due to Misdiagnosed Cause, Lawmaker Raises Concerns

Photo courtesy of Yonhap News

 

 

[Alpha Biz= Paul Lee] KakaoBank experienced two separate service disruptions on March 17 after initially misidentifying the root cause of an app outage, raising concerns over system reliability.

According to data submitted to Rep. Lee Yang-soo of the National Assembly’s Political Affairs Committee on March 20, the bank’s mobile app was inaccessible for about 26 minutes starting at 3:29 p.m., followed by a second outage lasting eight minutes from 5:30 p.m.

KakaoBank initially attributed the issue to a recently deployed update and rolled it back shortly after detecting the disruption. Service resumed at around 3:55 p.m. However, the bank later determined that the actual cause was a configuration change that increased the intensity of its internal monitoring system, placing excessive load on servers.

During the process of restoring the original settings, a second service disruption occurred.

KakaoBank stated that no direct financial damage—such as erroneous transfers or duplicate payments—was reported. However, 184 customer complaints were filed, including cases where users were unable to participate in IPO subscriptions due to the outage. The bank said it is reviewing potential compensation measures.

Rep. Lee criticized the incident, noting that the failure to promptly identify the root cause at a platform used by more than 26 million users could undermine consumer trust, and called for a comprehensive review of the bank’s systems and oversight by financial authorities.

 

 

Alphabiz Reporter Paul Lee(hoondork1977@alphabiz.co.kr)