A fire caused by an exploding lithium-ion battery at a key government data center in Daejeon, South Korea, has knocked more than 600 essential public services offline. The blaze began Friday night at the National Information Resources Service (NIRS) facility after a battery exploded during relocation work. This triggered a severe “thermal runaway,” a reaction that generated intense heat and made firefighting efforts challenging for nearly 10 hours.
To prevent servers from overheating and sustaining further damage, authorities proactively shut down all 647 government IT systems housed at the Daejeon center. Although the fire was extinguished by Saturday evening, high temperatures in the server room prevented immediate restoration work. The nationwide outage crippled essential public services, making mobile IDs inaccessible for travelers at airports and blocking money transfers and card payments for the national postal service. Emergency services also lost critical location-tracking capabilities for their rescue system.
South Korea’s Ministry of the Interior and Safety is currently leading the recovery efforts, prioritizing services based on public safety and economic impact. By Monday, Safety Minister Yun Hojung confirmed that 46 services had been restored, including the main public services portal, Government24, and parts of the Korea Post’s financial systems. However, officials noted that 96 of the systems most directly impacted by the fire will be more difficult to restart, and a full recovery timeline remains uncertain. One worker sustained first-degree burns in the incident.
Prime Minister Kim Min-seok publicly apologized for the disruption, acknowledging the vulnerabilities that come with concentrating so many critical systems in a single location. In response to the crisis, President Lee Jae Myung has ordered a “significant improvement” in the security of government systems to prevent similar outages in the future. The incident highlights the risks posed by such a high level of digital centralization.
This event marks the second major data center fire in South Korea in three years, following a 2022 blaze that disrupted the popular KakaoTalk messaging app for 50 million users. The repeated incidents underscore a critical need for more robust infrastructure and better emergency protocols to protect the country’s highly digitized public services from future disruptions.
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