Cocoa: Can South Korea’s symbol of innovation regain its shine?

SEOUL – On a Saturday afternoon nearly two years ago, South Koreans panicked when internet platform Kakao suddenly stopped its services due to an outage in its data center. The outage lasted for 24 hours and caused chaos as tens of millions of users were unable to withdraw money, buy food from e-commerce platforms, call a taxi or send messages to family and friends.

The incident made clear how large Kakao’s influence over the country had become, as well as how risky it was to rely on a single company for important services. But for many in South Korea, life without Cocoa is still unimaginable; The company has been plagued by legal problems, fines, market dominance and growing public antipathy towards aggressive takeovers.