A fire at a key government data centre in Daejeon has partially paralysed digital public services in South Korea, one of the world’s most computerised countries. The incident highlighted fundamental gaps in the government’s business continuity and disaster recovery strategy.
By Monday, only a few dozen of the more than 640 immobilised systems had been restored.
The cause of the fire, which occurred during routine maintenance, was most likely the explosion of batteries in the emergency power system. The batteries were more than ten years old, as the Ministry of Security determined, and their warranty expired last year.
Moreover, LG CNS, the company responsible for their maintenance, had already recommended their replacement in June 2024. The neglect of this recommendation became the spark igniting a crisis of national proportions, which disrupted the work of the police, customs and fire services, among others.
The situation is all the more surprising as this is not the first incident of its kind in the country. In 2022, a fire in a commercial data centre disabled some of the most popular applications, including Kakao messenger, for hours.
Despite that experience, and similar problems with government systems in 2023, the public administration proved to be unprepared. Experts point out that the government lacked adequate mechanisms for real-time data synchronisation and recovery, which should be standard for critical infrastructure.
President Lee Jae Myung apologised for the disruption and ordered an urgent plan to improve the security of government systems. The government temporarily extended the deadlines for some tax payments and waived fees for issuing documents.
However, it may take at least four weeks to fully restore some of the most damaged systems. The Daejeon incident becomes a painful lesson, showing that even technological leaders cannot afford to be negligent in the area of basic IT infrastructure security.
