South Korean President Lee Jae Myung toured a damaged state data centre on Friday to pull the latest on recovery work after a big fire hit the facility last month. He visited the National Information Resources Service (NIRS) in Daejeon, where the blaze that started on Sept. 26 destroyed batteries and servers and knocked out hundreds of online government services.
The fire caused a nationwide outage, forcing many agencies to shut down services that citizens rely on for everything from tax filing to land records. As of Friday, the NIRS had restored 30.2 % of the services that were offline. That means about 214 of the 709 systems that were hit by the fire are back online, according to the Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters.
Lee had originally taken the day off after the extended Chuseok holiday ended on Thursday. Instead, he chose to see the damage up close, hoping to boost morale for the civil‑servants still working hard in the holiday period. A presidential spokesperson said the trip was pre‑planned and unrelated to Lee’s recent TV participation.
The President appeared on a cooking show earlier this month, a move some critics say was ill‑timed in the middle of a crisis that plunged government websites into chaos. The ruling Democratic Party defended the appearance, saying it “promotes Korean food.” In contrast, the main opposition party, the People Power Party, called the decision inappropriate.
The government has also faced scrutiny for how it reported the scale of the outage. Two weeks after the fire, officials raised the number of malfunctioning systems from 647 to 709, raising questions about transparency.
In the week of the Chuseok break, only 47 of the affected services returned to normal. Among the 214 services that are now online are the Public Procurement Service’s new e‑commerce mall, the interior ministry’s core records system, the finance ministry’s legislative‑support platform, and the land ministry’s real‑estate data hub. These milestones signal progress in restoring the digital infrastructure that underpins South Korea’s public services.
The fire tore through data storage stacks, causing massive heat and smoke that took a full day to extinguish. The damage to the NIRS facilities has disrupted key government operations, prompting the government to accelerate efforts to rebuild data centers, boost cyber resilience, and improve emergency response protocols.
Lee’s on‑site visit underscores the administration’s focus on fixing the digital damage and reassuring citizens that fast, reliable government services are a priority. As recovery moves forward, officials are working to bring all 709 affected systems back online, aiming for full service capacity in the coming weeks.
Source: ianslive
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