Song Ji-hye, third from right, head of Kakao's KakaoTalk Division and a member of the damage support council, poses with members from a lobby group of small business owners and civic groups after agreeing to offer up to 50,000 won to small business owners who experienced inconveniences due to Kakao's service disruptions, Thursday. Courtesy of Kakao

By Baek Byung-yeul

Kakao decided to offer up to 50,000 won ($39.50) to small business owners, along with free emoticons for every user of its messenger service, KakaoTalk, as compensation to users who suffered from service disruptions, which occurred on Oct. 15, the internet company said Thursday.

The company announced the damage compensation plan in collaboration with the damage support council, comprised of officials from a lobby group of small business owners, civic groups and Kakao itself. They said the company will provide 30,000 won for small business owners with sales losses of less than 300,000 won, and 50,000 won for losses of between 300,000 won and 500,000 won.

For cases of losses worth over 500,000 won, additional compensation measures will be considered after the council reviews the cases. The company will also operate a separate customer service center for compensation, they added.

"The council closely analyzed damage cases and verified and discussed individual cases several times with members representing each organization," Song Ji-hye, head of Kakao's KakaoTalk Division and a member of the consultative body, said.

"While drawing up the compensation plan, we have been helped a lot by government agencies such as the Ministry of Science and ICT, the Ministry of SMEs and Startups, the Korea Communications Commission and members of the National Assembly," Song added.

The compensation measures announced were due to the fire that occurred on Oct. 15 at a data center run by SK C&C in Pangyo, Gyeonggi Province, which houses Kakao's servers. Due to the fire, various Kakao services, including the KakaoTalk messenger service, were disrupted for about 10 hours.

Despite the fact that the data center was not operated by Kakao, the company was heavily criticized for not having a proper backup system in case of an accident. In response to the incident, the company announced it will establish its own data centers and promised to come up with compensation plans for victims of the incident.

The consultative body said they received complaints of losses for 19 days from Oct. 19 to Nov. 6. They analyzed 87,195 cases of losses caused by Kakao's service disruptions and 79.8 percent of the total cases were reported by general users, followed by 20 percent by small business owners and 0.2 percent by medium and large companies.

In addition to Kakao, which operates the KakaoTalk service, Kakao Group's other affiliates such as Kakao Games, Kakao Mobility, Kakao Entertainment and Kakao Pay also brought up compensation plans.

Kakao Games, a game distributor, will offer more benefits to users who play their games at internet cafes known in Korean as "PC bang" so that they will receive more customers.

Kakao Mobility already carried out various compensation measures to support taxi drivers who were inconvenienced during their operations during the service disruption. Drivers who subscribed to Kakao's taxi-hailing service were compensated with points for commission fees equivalent to three times the amount of time in which they were affected by the service outage.