Naver headquarters in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province / Korea Times photo by Bae Woo-han

By Park Jae-hyuk

Naver inconvenienced its users and business partners last week via a series of disruptions in its various services, according to industry officials, Monday.

Users who searched for the terms "Christmas" or "Christmas cake" via the Naver Map app last Friday were not able to locate cake stores, except for SPC Group's bakery chain Paris Baguette and Baskin-Robbins, a U.S. ice cream chain operated in Korea by SPC.

Paris Baguette and Baskin-Robbins could be displayed, but not always the stores located closest to the searcher's physical location. In addition, Naver Map only showed the locations of Paris Baguette stores, even to users who typed the words "Tous Les Jours cake." Tous Les Jours is CJ Foodville's bakery chain, the main rival of Paris Baguette.

According to Naver, the error lasted from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. that day.

Tous Les Jours franchisees and self-employed bakery owners, therefore, seem to have suffered a loss of earnings, although it is still difficult for them to prove that their losses were caused by the error in Naver Map.

"After finding out the excessively high similarity between the specific brands and Christmas-related keywords in our synonym processing, we corrected the error," a Naver official said.

A day earlier, flight tickets that were not subject to Naver's 100,000 won ($77) discount event were sold mistakenly for lower prices via Naver Flight, a flight ticket platform that acts as a broker between travel agencies and travelers.

Before Naver corrected the error at 3 a.m., users discovered the flight tickets were being sold at a discount at midnight. As a result, travelers who finished purchasing their tickets during that time got a discount, while those who did not finish their purchases were forced to cancel their reservations.

Naver said it will talk with travel agencies regarding the matter.

Naver CEO Choi Soo-yeon / Courtesy of Naver

On the same day, a disruption in Naver's news service also occurred between 4:50 p.m. and 6:50 p.m., hindering news outlets from sending their news to the portal. Korean news outlets rely heavily on Naver to distribute their articles, as most people use the portal to consume news content.

Naver explained that a problem in its infrastructure storage was the reason for the error.

"We apologize for your inconvenience," Naver said in an announcement sent to the press at 7 p.m. that day.

When a data center fire in October caused the worst-ever disruptions to Kakao's services, Naver was recognized for its swift restoration of services by using backup servers. The series of recent errors, however, caused concerns that Naver may not be the exception when it comes to a possible server outage.

Last month, Naver was also embroiled in a controversy due to the inaccessibility of its major services, such as news, shopping, maps, music, webtoons, blogs and forums. At that time, the company attributed the error to traffic congestion caused by livestreaming of the League of Legends World Championship.