A fire broke out at a Samsung data center in South Korea Sunday, causing worldwide service outages for its global website and smart TV apps.
Samsung services went off the grid for a while on Easter, after a blaze at a Samsung SDS building in Gwacheon, South Korea, ignited just past noon on Sunday. The fire damaged the electronic payment systems and online services of its credit card and insurance subsidiaries, affecting Samsung cardholders. Samsung confirmed the fire and the outage in a Korean SDS blog post, Sunday.
The Samsung SDS building is a subsidiary of Samsung Group and a provider of software services, outsourcing and consulting. The loss of service lasted for four and a half hours, before it was fully restored at about 7.30 p.m. local time (10:30 GMT / 6:15 a.m. ET), according to the company's statement.
"We have detected a brief service disruption caused by network outage which lasted from 06:00 to 10:30(GMT), April 20th, 2014. The service has been restored as of 10:30(GMT)," Samsung said in a statement, Engadget reported. "We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused."
The exact cause of the fire is still being investigated, but company officials assumed the flames started at a smoke pipe on the building's exterior area, Korea Times reported.
As a part of the outage, users were unable to access the Samsung's Smart Hub service on their smart TVs, which returned with errors. The official global website, Samsung.com, remained inaccessible throughout the outage. Samsung cardholders were not accepted at malls after the company's online payment system crashed.
Users expressed their aggravation on Twitter, while some local users also posted photos and videos of the Samsung facility ablaze.
Photo of Yonhap showing materials of Samsung SDS building is falling off because of fire,. pic.twitter.com/E1gzO9t3ff
— Jaehwan Cho 조재환 (@hohocho) April 20, 2014
헐. 과천 삼성 SDS 건물에 불났네. 사상자가 없었으면 좋겠는데. pic.twitter.com/uwefIMgDI1 — Joshua (@shbaik82) April 20, 2014
Samsung reassured its users that there was no risk of data leak, as officials quickly blocked the servers at the Gwacheon center. There will reportedly be no data loss - information is backed up at the corporation's headquarters in Suwon. Samsung official told Korea Times that the company will compensate for the customer's loss.
"We've told the affected firms to resume services as quickly as possible and compensate customers for all damage caused by the disruptions," the official said. "We are also taking precautions against possible data leaks from the Samsung affiliates. We asked them to take appropriate measures regarding the damaged servers."
