The kakaku.com breach and a self-imposed shutdown (2005)

What halting its flagship by choice showed a platform

What the 2005 breach laid bare was a paradox: the more traffic a site draws, the more that very drawing power can turn into an instrument of harm. Had it been the theft of personal data, the damage would have stayed with the owners of that data; but a tampering that infects visitors merely by their viewing the page swells the harm in proportion to how many come. The full shutdown Akita chose on 14 May was a decision to halt the breadwinner and throw away daily revenue — and, at the same time, the flip side of the fact that no other means was left to protect visitors from infection. That the only defensive option was a total stoppage reveals how thin the layers of defence were across internet services of the day.

The refunds and compensation, and a full system overhaul rebuilt from the operating system up, were less an investment to recover lost sales than an outlay to hold on to trust once it had been damaged. Price comparison as a business rests on users believing that its information is accurate and its pages safe to view; once that trust collapses, the traffic, the advertising and the referral fees all thin out together. Paying the price of a roughly ten-day shutdown and the leak of more than twenty thousand email addresses, what Kakaku.com put first was not near-term sales but the recovery of its reputation for being safe. The episode remains as one that, early in the company’s expansion, made it confirm that for a platform, safety is the precondition of the service.