Coupang, Coupang Eats and Coupang Play all briefly go down
Coupang says outage occurred during service upgrade
Coupang Inc, South Korea's top e-commerce app with more than 30 million monthly users, suffered an outage lasting roughly two hours, leaving many customers unable to access the platform.
The disruption began around midnight Thursday, when users found they could not load the opening screen of the Coupang, Coupang Eats and Coupang Play apps and websites.
Affected screens displayed only the message: "Your network connection is unstable. Please check your connection and try again."
From around 1 a.m., users could reach the Coupang app's main page, but clicking on any product triggered the same error message or prevented them from logging in.
Customers who had tried to place early-morning delivery orders were left unable to do so during the outage.
The problem was resolved around 2:30 a.m. Coupang posted a notice on its website saying a temporary error had affected its services during a service upgrade and that normal access had been restored.
The company also sent text messages to customers who had previously contacted its customer service center, informing them that services were back to normal.
Coupang's logistics website was also affected by the outage. The company said it believes the disruption occurred during an update and is investigating the exact cause.
Meanwhile, Coupang has filed a lawsuit challenging a fine of around 624.6 billion won ($463 million) — the largest penalty ever imposed in South Korea for a single personal data breach — levied by the Personal Information Protection Commission.
According to legal sources, Coupang filed two separate lawsuits Wednesday at the Seoul Administrative Court against the Personal Information Protection Commission, seeking to overturn the fines. The suits target a 423.5 billion won penalty related to a personal data leak and a 201.1 billion won fine for the unauthorized collection of online activity records belonging to more than 10 million members — totaling 624.6 billion won. Both fines were approved by the commission in June, and Coupang filed a separate suit for each.
killpass@heraldcorp.com
