Ubiquitous South Korea App Goes Offline, Raising Fresh Concerns Over Tech Giants

SEOUL—Kakao South Korea’s so-called everything app, dropped out of service over the weekend, spurring widespread disruption in life and business that exposed the vulnerabilities created should an ubiquitous tech giant be forced offline.

Kakao’s main services—messaging to ride hailing to mobile payments—suffered outages on Saturday, following a fire at a facility housing a large proportion of the company’s data servers. Not all of the company’s offerings had been restored as of Monday.