"What's Wrong with Coupang?" Sudden Glitches in the Early Hours Cause Widespread Disruption

[Anchor]

In the early hours of today (October 9), major Coupang services experienced a simultaneous blackout. With access disrupted not only to early-morning delivery services but also to the Coupang Eats food delivery app, customers, small business owners, and delivery drivers alike faced severe inconvenience.

Here is our report by Min Gyeongho.

[Reporter]

A user attempts to open the Coupang application installed on their smartphone, but no products appear on the screen.

Even after entering an ID and password, the system only returns a message stating that the data request has failed.

These connection errors occurred simultaneously on both Coupang and Coupang Eats starting around 12:30 a.m. today.

[Coupang User: I clicked to read a review, and it just said 'No products available.' So I thought, what is this...]

The system that delivery drivers use to check delivery addresses and take photos after completing drop-offs also ground to a halt, leaving logistics centers and delivery vehicles packed with undelivered items during peak busy hours.

[Coupang Early-Morning Delivery Driver: When delivering, we need to register the departure and the completion. That itself is not working.]

Coupang Eats, the delivery app, also went down, halting order reception and deliveries for small business owners and delivery riders.

[Coupang Eats Restaurant Owner: We need to press the order preparation complete button so that delivery drivers can be dispatched, but the button wouldn't press... In terms of hourly sales, that's a loss of 200,000 to 250,000 won.]

Communities for small business owners were flooded with posts venting their frustration.

The Coupang connection error incident was normalized after two and a half hours, and Coupang announced that a temporary error occurred during a service upgrade process.

It is reported that no traces of external hacking have been found so far.

Coupang stated that it will compensate customers who failed to receive their deliveries with 5,000 won and those whose food orders were cancelled with a 3,000-won coupon.

The company also plans to compensate restaurant owners and delivery riders for the cancelled amounts.

(Video Shooting: Kim Hak-mo, Yang Ji-hun | Video Editing: Lee Sang-min)

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