Most of our readers aren’t in South Korea or reading South Korean news, so the huge story there about a data center fire in Pangyo, Seongnam, this past weekend probably escaped your notice. However, it does appear to have affected MMOs in our orbit.
Kakao’s Moonlight Sculptor, for example, was offline over part of last weekend specifically due to the “fire incident in the server center in South Korea.” Kakao had the game back online on October 15th and as of today is rolling out apologies and compensation for the downtime, which includes a bundle of buff elixirs, arena tokens, guild attendance perks, and battlefield rewards.
According to local media, the data center was owned by SK Group and affected South Korean internet giants Naver and Kakao, taking out a whole lot more than just video games. Apparently, the government is investigating the impact on finance, comms, and transport services, criticizing Kakao in particular; the company defended itself by pointing out “it is the first time in the history of IT in which 32,000 servers were shut down.” Kakao’s stock was nevertheless dinged on the news.
While the Pangyo fire might have the largest impact of such incidents, it’s far from the first to touch on the MMO genre; last year, a fire at the OVH facility in Strasbourg, France, destroyed multiple buildings and took both MechWarrior Online and RUST offline, with RUST EU players losing character data.
