A fire at a key government data center in South Korea knocked out hundreds of online services on Saturday, leaving citizens frustrated and officials scrambling to fix the mess. The blaze started in Daejeon at the National Information Resources Service when a lithium-ion battery exploded in a computer room on the fifth floor.
Workers were moving the batteries to the basement at the time, and one of the uninterruptible power supply units went up in flames. By Saturday morning, 647 government services had gone offline, hitting everything from mobile ID checks to online postal options. That’s about one-third of the country’s total online government systems, experts say.
The outage even crippled the location-tracking feature for the 119 emergency rescue service, stalled official document issuance, and locked officials out of the Onnara System intranet. Websites for big players like the prime minister’s office, interior ministry, and finance ministry stayed down too.
Vice Interior Minister Kim Min-jae explained that authorities shut things down as a precaution after the fire messed with the building’s temperature and humidity controls, risking server overheating. “We’re repairing that equipment now,” Kim said during a press briefing. “Once it’s fixed, we’ll restart the servers, starting with essential services like postal and financial ones.”
Firefighters battled the flames for nearly 10 hours, getting the main fire under control by 6:30 a.m. But it flared up again later, so crews kept working to ventilate the building. Around 200 firefighters, dozens of trucks, and other gear rushed to the scene. Sadly, one battery handler suffered first-degree burns to his arms and face, and about 400 lithium-ion battery packs got destroyed.
In an emergency meeting, Interior Minister Yun Ho-jung bumped up the crisis level for government IT systems from “alert” to “serious.” “We’ll throw every resource at this to wrap it up fast and cut down on headaches for people,” Yun promised.
Prime Minister Kim Min-seok stepped in with an apology, vowing the team would hustle to bring services back online. For everyday folks, the disruptions hit hard. A 53-year-old man named Lee, from north of Seoul, couldn’t use his Korea Post debit card at a convenience store because the payment system failed. Others griped about frozen money transfers on Korea Post accounts, according to Yonhap news.
Recovery efforts continue, but no one’s sure yet when full service will return in this South Korea data center fire aftermath.
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