Time spent on KakaoTalk messenger back to pre-service disruption level: data

The amount of time Korean people spent on the country's most popular mobile messenger KakaoTalk was restored to the normal level two months after it suffered extensive service disruptions stemming from a fire at a data center, industry data showed Tuesday.

Users spent an average of 32.18 minutes using the KakaoTalk app per day as of Friday last week, compared with 33.3 minutes tallied a year ago, according to the data from Mobile Index.

The time dropped to 18.2 minutes on Oct. 15 when a fire at the SK C&C building in Pangyo, just south of Seoul, caused an extensive internet, banking and messenger service disruption here as the data center houses servers of Kakao Corp.

Nearly all online services provided by Kakao, ranging from online messenger KakaoTalk to banking service Kakao Bank and traffic app Kakao T, were affected as the company locates most of its servers at the Pangyo data center. The service disorder continued for some five days.

The number of daily active users inched up to 35 million last week from 34 million on the day of fire. KakaoTalk's DAU was 37 million a year ago.

The Mobile Index data also showed that Kakao T saw its average time spent per visit rebound to 4.62 minutes from 2.87 minutes over the near-two-month period.

People spent an average 10.35 minutes on Kakao Map, Kakao's map and navigation service app, last week, up from 8.35 minutes on the day of the fire. (Yonhap)