South Korea’s largest e-commerce retailer Coupang’s service froze for several hours on Wednesday morning showing all products “out of stock,” with customers unable to place orders or make payments.

The outage on Coupang’s mobile application and website started at 7 a.m.
 
Although customers could add items to their shopping cart they were unable to proceed with the order.

Coupang attributed the problem to a technical glitch.

While customers could start buying some products by 11 p.m., the system has not been fully restored, the company said in a statement.

“We apologize for causing inconvenience to our customers and will do our best to avoid such problems in the future,” it said.

The company faced a similar situation in November last year, when its service was unavailable due to problems related with Amazon Web Service, the cloud computing platform it uses.

By Kim Da-sol (ddd@heraldcorp.com)