Fire at South Korean Government Building Causes Nationwide Outages

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Hundreds of tell services were offline the daylight after a atomic number 3 stamp battery exploded during maintenance work at a data center, officials said.

By John Yoon

A fire on Friday at a state data center in South Korea caused a nationwide outage to hundreds of key government services, leaving officials racing to restore them throughout the next day.

On Saturday, ministry websites, needed to obtain official documents for a variety of purposes, were down. The national postal service switched to processing mail offline, threatening to create a delay in delivery. Mobile identification cards, used widely instead of physical cards, were inaccessible. Many government employees’ email services were down.

The blaze at the National Information Resources Service in Daejeon, a central South Korean city, started around 8:15 p.m. Local time on Friday, when one of the lithium batteries supplying power to the facility’s computers exploded during maintenance work, Kim Min-jae, the vice interior minister, said at a news conference on Saturday.

The fire initially disrupted the computer servers for about 70 government systems, he said. But at the risk of overheating other servers in the building, the rest of the 647 systems at the data center were shut down on Friday night during the operation to put out the fire, he said.

The blaze was brought under control around 6:30 a.m. On Saturday. But all systems at the data center remained offline as of Saturday morning, Mr. Kim said. Officials would not be able to begin restoring them until the smoke cleared and the temperature returned to normal, enabling the cooling systems to be restarted, he said.

The fire set off an intense overnight operation involving nearly 200 firefighters and more than 60 engines, said Kim Ki-sun, the fire chief of Yuseong, a district in Daejeon. The operation was complicated by the inability to use water, because it could cause batteries to explode and damage the servers, he said.

One contractor who was working on the batteries sustained minor injuries from the fire, said Jung Gwang-yong, an official at the data center.

Lee Jae-yong, the director of the data center, said at the news conference that it was too early to say when the systems would be restored. Fire officials had not immediately investigated the exact cause of the fire by Saturday morning.

Some government websites had been restored through alternative servers by Saturday morning, officials said. But the postal service and the financial system were among those still offline that officials were prioritizing, Mr. Kim said.

Kim Min-seok, South Korea’s prime minister, apologized to citizens for the inconvenience caused by the disruptions and said that he had ordered the systems directly affecting people’s daily lives to be restored as quickly as possible.

In a public notice on Saturday morning, the Interior Ministry urged citizens to confirm the availability of services before visiting an administrative agency.

“We ask for your understanding that delays or restrictions may occur on-site,” the ministry said, adding that it was working to implement alternative measures, like manual processing and extending deadlines, while the outage was ongoing.

John Yoon is a Times reporter based in Seoul who covers breaking and trending news.

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