Fire at government data center halts 647 systems, disrupts services

A fire at the National Information Resources Service’s data center in Daejeon late Friday temporarily shut down 647 government IT systems, according to the Ministry of Interior and Safety.

During an emergency press briefing at the Government Complex Seoul on Saturday, vice minister Kim Min-jae stated that the blaze disrupted air conditioning and dehumidifying systems, raising concerns over overheating servers.

“To protect information systems, we took preemptive measures to suspend operations,” explained Kim.

Fire authorities received a report of a lithium battery fire at the national data infrastructure center at 8:20 p.m. on Friday and deployed 101 firefighters and 31 fire vehicles.

The National Information Resources Service oversees around 1,600 government services in total, with its headquarters based in Daejeon and additional sites in Gwangju and Daegu. The 647 halted systems were all based in the Daejeon headquarters.

The fire was declared extinguished at 6:30 a.m., Saturday, around 10 hours after the initial report was made. As using large amounts of water could damage national resource data, they relied on fire suppression systems such as carbon dioxide — which slowed down the speed of extinguishing the fire.

“The fire originated from an uninterruptible power supply battery that had been disconnected for relocation work to the basement,” said Kim to explain the cause behind the fire. UPS batteries are known to maintain a continuous and stable power supply to IT systems in the event of an outage, without interruption.

The vice minister stressed that the ministry is prioritizing the restoration of the cooling system and will sequentially restart servers, with essential services such as postal banking and delivery restored first.

To minimize disruptions, the Interior Ministry has asked relevant agencies to extend deadlines for tax payments and document submissions until systems return to normal.

Emergency alerts were also sent out Saturday morning to notify citizens about limited access to services run by the government.

Kim urged citizens to use alternative websites or offline offices where possible to get their administrative work done.

“We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused by this disruption, and we will put in every effort to restore services as quickly as possible,” said Kim.