While the full extent of the damage is still being assessed, local media reports indicate that two recent incidents caused severe disruptions to hundreds of government digital services across South Korea, with many records from the nation`s equivalent of public service portals potentially lost permanently.
Two separate fires in South Korean data centers have led to the shutdown of several hundred online services, encompassing critical government public services, postal operations, and tax submission platforms. The first blaze occurred on September 26th at the National Information Resources Service building and was successfully extinguished the following day.
According to The Korea Herald, experts are actively investigating the precise cause of the fire, but it is suspected that lithium-ion batteries ignited while being transferred to the data center`s basement. This incident resulted in the destruction of a government cloud storage facility, consequently disrupting the functionality of over 600 essential services.
Days later, a second fire erupted at the data center of Lotte Innovate, an IT service provider. Preliminary findings also suggest battery ignition as the cause. As reported by Yonhap, authorities have thus far only managed to restore a fraction of the services impacted at this facility.
Authorities reported that the service recovery rate stood at 24% recently. Out of 647 services interrupted due to the fire at the National Information Resources Service in Daejeon, 157 have been successfully reinstated. Overall, 96 systems were completely destroyed by the fire. As a precautionary measure, 647 data center services were deliberately shut down by authorities to prevent other servers from overheating. Among the disabled systems are email services, mobile identification, and portals for submitting complaints and paying taxes. The government announced plans to relocate these services to another national data center in Daegu, a move expected to significantly expedite the recovery process for the remaining services.
Following these data center fires, police have launched an investigation into potential employee negligence, which has already resulted in the arrest of four individuals.
Rupert Blackwood 
Clement Ashworth