South Korea is working to bring back government digital services after a fire at a state-run data centre exposed weaknesses in its online infrastructure. Officials said on Monday that fewer than a tenth of the disrupted services had been restored, with no clear timeline for full recovery.
The fire broke out on Friday during maintenance at the National Information Resources Service facility in Daejeon, which houses core government servers. The blaze disrupted about 647 systems, including websites for police, fire services and customs authorities. By Monday, only 62 systems were back online, according to the safety ministry, whose own website was also affected.
Safety Minister Yun Ho-jung said services were being restored gradually, highlighting the recovery of Government24, the country’s main public services portal, as well as financial and postal systems. President Lee Jae Myung apologised for the disruption, expressing concern that the government lacked proper backup systems despite similar outages in the past.
Vice Safety Minister Kim Min-jae said deadlines for some tax payments had been extended and document fees waived. He added that at least four weeks would be required to restore nearly 100 systems severely damaged by the fire. Experts warned that the incident showed inadequate planning for immediate recovery of critical services, despite previous digital disruptions.
In 2022, a separate fire at a data centre caused widespread outages for major apps and services in the country. Lee Seong-yeob of Korea University’s Graduate School of Management of Technology said, “Such disruptions should never occur at a national agency, and real-time synchronisation and recovery systems need to be implemented as soon as possible.”
Investigators believe the blaze was triggered by an expired battery made by LG Energy Solution, which had been in use for more than a decade. The safety ministry said LG CNS, an affiliate that sold and maintained the batteries, had advised the government in June 2024 to replace them, but they remained in operation.
Authorities have warned of continued disruption in daily life as recovery work goes on. President Lee has ordered “significant improvement” in the security of government systems and called for budget proposals to fund stronger emergency measures.
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