South Korean entertainment company JYP Entertainment said its website was hacked, following a row involving Chou Tzuyu, 16, who waved a Taiwanese flag on South Korean TV. She is a member of the multinational K-pop girl group Twice.
The Taiwanese pop star promoted by the company recently made a video apologizing for waving the flag, which the company posted on its website and denied coercing the star to do so. No sooner did the video appear accusations were directed at the entertainment firm claiming that it pressured the star to apologize in a bid to appease angered Chinese fans, the BBC reported.
The company's website had been inaccessible over the weekend and had coincided with Chou 's apology going online, the British news outfit said quoting a recent interview JYP conducted with with a South Korean news agency.
JYP said it suspected the website was hacked by a form of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS ) attack, where heavy traffic is generated to overwhelm hosting servers, causing a breakdown. However, the company said it did not know where the attack had generated from.
The company said it will take some time for the site to get back online.While Taiwan has been under self rule since breaking away from China in 1949 it is still viewed as a breakaway province.
For the JYP company, Chinese fans belong to a key market for the firm and the furore erupted just prior to elections in Taiwan which were won by Tsai Ing-wen.
Chou carried the flag on South Korean TV in November 2015 while introducing band members. While the clip was not broadcast on air it was shared in China through websites and the matter was raised during election campaigns in Taiwan .
According to reports, many people in Taiwan saw Chou's apology as humiliating for their country and a reminder to many that Taiwan, though a sovereign state, is not recognized as being one officially.
Meanwhile, the Center for Multicultural Korea (CMCK), said it will lodge a formal complaint with the national rights watchdog about the pop star's treatment, Reuters reported.
The South Korean multicultural group said it will urge the commission to investigate if the apology by the singer was coerced or not. The video below shows the clip of the singer's apology: