Whon Namkoong, the co-CEO of Kakao Corp., announced his resignation Wednesday after a data center outage shut down South Korea's most used mobile chat app along with its associated services, drawing ire from the public and government authorities.

The outage caused chaos in South Korea over the weekend, as millions were unable to communicate with one another and strained commerce.

The services offered by Kakao range from a variety of music apps to finance and community-based apps like KakaoTalk. KakaoTalk is one of the most used messaging platforms in South Korea, with more than 47 million active users in a country of nearly 52 million. Businesses, banks, and government authorities also use Kakao services.

Expressing remorse at a press conference, Namkoong, 50, said he felt "the heavy burden of responsibility." He added that Kakao Corp. will do its best to resolve the issues and prevent them from reoccurring.

"We caused a great inconvenience to everyone," said Namkoong. "I know that now more than ever it will take a long time and lots of effort to gain back the trust that we have lost."

Namkoong's resignation leaves co-CEO Euntaek Hong as the sole CEO of Kakao Corp. Hong is currently leading the emergency task force team looking into the fire incident at the SK C&C data center in Pangyo that caused the disruption of services.

Most of Kakao services were restored by early Wednesday, though minor disruptions were still reported.

South Korea