Ilbe says server failure wiped recent images, text data intact

Online community Ilbe (Ilgan Best Storage) said Monday that a server failure affecting its image and video storage system was behind ongoing access problems on its website. The disruption involves roughly 20 terabytes of recently stored image and video data.

Ilbe announced on its official Instagram account Monday morning that "the current outage is caused by a problem with the server that stores image and video files." The operators said they had retrieved the affected server for data recovery and would bring in a professional recovery firm to restore the data.

"We will do our best to restore as much data as possible from the existing image server," the operators added. "We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience."

Text data from posts has been preserved and is unaffected, the operators said. Only image and video data were impacted, and the loss is limited to recently stored files rather than the site's entire image archive. The scope of recoverable data and a timeline for full restoration have not been confirmed.

The outage first appeared intermittently Sunday and continued into Monday morning, with the site still inaccessible as of 11 a.m. Users attempting to connect received a "504 Gateway Timeout" error.

A 504 error occurs when an intermediary server between the user and the web server fails to receive a response from the origin server. Server overload, internal failure and deliberate blocking by operators can all produce the same error code, making it impossible to determine the cause from the error number alone.

Some online users speculated that the outage resulted from a government-ordered block under the revised Network Act — commonly referred to as the "7·7 Law" — which took effect July 7. The theory gained traction because Ilbe has long been embroiled in controversy over the spread of false information and illegal content, and the timing of the law's implementation coincided with the disruption.

Others linked the outage to photos and videos related to a YouTuber's death that circulated online Sunday, noting that only text data remained intact on the server while recently stored images and videos were the ones affected. No evidence has been found to support either claim.