Disruptions arise after Samsung SDS fire

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Disruptions arise after Samsung SDS fire

The day after a fire broke out at the Samsung SDS data center in Gwacheon, south of Seoul, consumers at the conglomerate’s financial affiliates continued to experience disruptions in their services.

Samsung SDS is an IT company that manages the servers for Samsung group affiliates.

Samsung Card said yesterday that due to the fire, which flared up on Sunday just after noon, all of its services offered through its website and smartphone applications had been halted as of 6 p.m. It also said that consumers were not able to use online payment services or receive text message services that are usually sent after payments are made.

According to the company, offline payments using its plastic cards are possible without any problem, but for consumers making overseas payments using cards affiliated with other partners, including American Express, they may be restricted in the amount they can settle.

The service disruptions came after Samsung SDS halted the operation of its servers at its data center out of concern that it could have lost data.

According to an inspection by the Financial Supervisory Service, financial affiliates that have their main data based at the Gwacheon center are Samsung Life Insurance, Samsung Card and Samsung Asset Management. The FSS inspection showed that to prevent data loss, normally financial companies save their data to more than two servers; however, some financial affiliates of Samsung Group were found to be only operating one in Gwacheon.

“After the fire, Samsung Card has started relocating data to another data center in Suwon,” said Yoon Taek-jung, an FSS official. “Service will be normalized once the main center [in Gwacheon] recovers completely.”

An official from Samsung Card, meanwhile, said that from last May, it had started the process of improving its system by establishing a backup center, which was schedule to be complete by next February.

“We are sorry problems occurred in the process of improving our data center,” the official said.

The company said that it plans on providing compensation to customers who have documented losses.

With a glitch in the operation of the Samsung SDS server that is in charge of network, the integrated information system of several affiliates of Samsung Group did not work. For affiliates that had their paydays yesterday, management officials had to visit bank branches to transfer employees’ salaries.

BY LEE GI-SANG [angie@joongang.co.kr]


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