Google vows to stabilize services in S. Korea

US tech giant Google vowed to pursue measures to preemptively detect service errors in South Korea and to notify local users through social media channels of such incidents, in adherence to a revised law.

South Korea revised its Telecommunications Business Act last year due to growing complaints against streaming giants Netflix and Google after multiple outages.

The new rules required large online content providers to report service errors and take measures to provide stable services. It applies to online companies that account for at least one percent of South Korea's average daily data traffic in the last three months of a year and those that have over a million daily users.

Among the companies covered were global tech giants Google, Facebook, Netflix, and local firms Naver, Kakao, and Wavve.

According to the Ministry of Science and ICT, Google experienced an authentication system error for approximately 50 minutes on Dec. 14 last year, as it did not allocate storage space for the system during a previous maintenance session.

Consequently, multiple Google services, including YouTube and Gmail, went down for around an hour globally, prompting the ministry to look into the matter.

As of January, Google has yet to receive any compensation claims globally for the service error.

The ministry plans to review Wavve's service error on Jan. 27 when its video-on-demand service partially stopped.