Datacenter fire takes 647 South Korean government services offline

Asia In Brief Over 600 e-government services operated by South Korea’s government are offline after a datacenter fire disrupted operations.

The fire struck on Friday night at a datacenter operated by South Korea’s National Information Resources Service. Korean media report that technicians replacing a lithium-ion battery inadvertently sparked a blaze. As is often the case with battery fires, firefighters struggled to control the blaze, which reached 234 batteries.

On Saturday, Korea’s government used the blog it hosts at local cloud service Naver to post a list of phone numbers citizens can use to contact government departments, because the fire also took out government email. By Sunday, government X accounts started to post advice on how to access services.

Late on Sunday night South Korea’s Ministry of the Interior and Safety said it had restored 30 services, leaving 617 offline.

This incident will doubtless spawn innumerable social ...