Firefighters respond to a fire at SK C&C's Pangyo facility in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, Saturday. Yonhap

By Lee Min-hyung

Kakao, the operator of Korea's dominant mobile messenger app KakaoTalk, is expected to face a Black Monday-esque scenario after its services were shut down for more than 10 hours, the longest-ever service outage in its history.

The company is considered one of the major growth stocks, enjoying a super-rally in 2021 due to excess liquidity at the time. But its upward momentum hit a snag at the beginning of 2022 as a consequence of the rapid pace of the rate hikes implemented by the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Bank of Korea.

According to the Korea Exchange, Kakao's share price peaked at 170,000 won in June last year, but has since lost steam. Its value tumbled below 50,000 won last week. Kakao shares closed at a new low of 47,300 won on Thursday for the first time since June 2020, though they soon bounced back to 51,400 won the following day on a technical rally.

Friday's rise was raising hopes of a long-awaited rebound. But those hopes are unlikely to last long after a major fire broke out on Saturday at SK C&C's Pangyo facility in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, which houses data centers of various IT companies including Kakao. It took around eight hours to extinguish the fire. The KakaoTalk messenger service, widely used in Korea, was unavailable during the period.