Cyworld goes offline as return proves underwhelming

Cyworld, Korea’s once highly popular social network, temporarily halted its service for an update from Tuesday after its return failed to take off.

Logo of Cyworld [CYWORLD Z]

Cyworld, Korea’s once highly popular social network, temporarily halted its service for an update from Tuesday after its return failed to take off.

“From 12 a.m. Tuesday, Cyworld will suspend its service for an app renewal,” the service notified its users on Monday.

Cyworld has been noting improvements to be made in its functions based on users’ responses after it reopened in April 2022. The social media platform will reboot related services based on feedback.

The platform will be put on hold for 120 days to mainly recover an additional 1.5 petabytes of photographs.

Once Korea’s most popular social media platform in the 2000s, the PC-based platform went out of vogue as users moved on to smartphones in the 2010s and through the advent of other smartphone-friendly social media services such as Facebook and Instagram.

The service eventually shut down in 2019 but reopened in April 2022 with a flourish as it recovered its database of some 17 billion photos previously posted on the service, gaining viral traction from users hoping to scoop up some of their past memories.

Monthly active users for April 2022 was 3.76 million, according to the market tracker Mobile Index. However, its popularity did not last long — the figure continued to decline, and in June, there were merely 640,000 monthly users.

The number of app installations was parallel to the monthly users. There were 2.87 million app installations in April 2022, which dwindled to a mere 50,000 in June.

Cyworld’s ambitious attempt to enter the metaverse realm also failed. Cytown, a metaverse app launched in June 2022, allowed the trading of cryptocurrencies to watch concerts, shop and play games. However, the service closed down last month without managing to find a breakthrough in the rapidly sinking metaverse bubble.

BY LEE JAE-LIM [lee.jaelim@joongang.co.kr]