A recent Kakao outage has raised monopoly concerns in South Korea; the company had previously claimed it had ~47.5M active users in the country of 51M+ people (Bryan Pietsch/Washington Post)

Jihye Lee / CNBC:
Kakao’s co-CEO Namkoong Whon resigns and apologizes for the recent outage; Hong Eun-taek, who led the company alongside Namkoong, will remain as sole CEO  —  A top executive at Kakao Corp., the operator of South Korea’s top mobile messenger KakaoTalk, will step down.

Tom Warren / The Verge:
WhatsApp confirms a major outage worldwide, starting around 3AM ET, and says it is “working to restore WhatsApp for everyone as quickly as possible”  —  WhatsApp is down in a major outage affecting the communications app.  The service started experiencing issues at around 3AM ET …

Kate Park / TechCrunch:
South Korean financial super app Toss raised $405M Series G at a 9.1T won valuation, or ~$7B, after a 8.5T won valuation in June ’21; Toss Bank has 5M users  —  Viva Republica, an operator of South Korean finance super app Toss, has finalized a $405 million Series G funding and it says it is now valued …

Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:
Rackspace confirms a ransomware attack caused an ongoing outage to its hosted Microsoft Exchange services, but its other products are fully operational  —  Texas-based cloud computing provider Rackspace has confirmed today that a ransomware attack is behind its ongoing Hosted Exchange outage.

William Gallagher / AppleInsider:
Local media: Korea’s Fair Trade Commission raided Apple’s Seoul offices over allegations it is charging App Store IAP fees of 33%, rather than the stated 30%  —  Officials from Korea’s Fair Trade Commission conducted a dawn raid on Apple’s offices in Gangnam-gu, Seoul, over allegations …

New York Times:
A look at South Korean conglomerate Naver’s experiments with a fleet of ~100 office robots, including efforts to make employees comfortable with their presence  —  Naver, a South Korean internet firm, is trying to introduce robots into the world of cubicles and conference rooms without making employees uncomfortable.