Small business groups demand compensation after 2-hour Coupang outage

Small business groups are demanding compensation for lost sales following a major system outage that hit Coupang Inc and Coupang Eats on Friday. Coupang Eats said it would pay store owners the full settlement amount — equivalent to a completed sale — for orders that were accepted and then canceled during the disruption.

Five organizations — the Korea Federation of Small and Medium Business, the Korea Merchants Federation, the Korea Food Service Industry Association, the Korea Franchise Industry Association and the National Cafe Owners Cooperative — issued a joint statement Sunday urging Coupang to assess the damages suffered by small business owners and draw up a substantive compensation plan.

The groups said the outage went beyond mere inconvenience and caused direct financial losses to small business operators. Restaurants that rely heavily on late-night delivery sales and online vendors that had paid for promotions and advertising were particularly hard hit, losing normal sales opportunities.

The system error began around midnight Friday and lasted more than two hours, disrupting delivery orders and shipments across both platforms.

On Coupang Eats, some store owners finished preparing orders but were unable to mark them as complete due to the error. Delivery drivers who arrived at stores could not retrieve customer addresses, forcing deliveries to be abandoned.

The small business groups urged Coupang to transparently calculate the sales losses incurred during the outage and prepare a compensation package that includes refunds of advertising fees.

Coupang Eats said it is paying store owners 100 percent of the settlement amount — the same as for a normal completed sale — for orders that were accepted and subsequently canceled during the outage.

The payments are processed automatically without any separate application, and advertising fees will not be charged for orders canceled during the outage, the company said.

"We again apologize for the inconvenience caused by the temporary service disruption," Coupang Eats said, adding that it has begun implementing the related compensation measures.