A lithium-ion battery explosion at a major government data center in South Korea has disrupted more than 600 critical services, underscoring the risks of centralizing vital digital infrastructure.
The fire broke out Friday night at the National Information Resources Service (NIRS) facility in Daejeon. According to officials, a disconnected battery exploded during relocation work around 8:20 PM, sparking a “thermal runaway” that generated extreme heat and complicated firefighting efforts. It took nearly 10 hours to bring the blaze under control, and lingering heat in the server rooms delayed immediate recovery.
Services Impacted
Authorities preemptively shut down all 647 IT systems at the center to prevent overheating and further damage. The outage crippled a wide range of essential services, including:
- Mobile identification systems, used as digital IDs, leaving travelers stranded at airports.
- Postal banking functions, causing failures in card payments and money transfers.
- Emergency services, where location-tracking for the 119 rescue system went offline.
- Government email networks and the national legal database, both rendered inaccessible.
Recovery Efforts
By Monday, Safety Minister Yun Hojung confirmed that 46 systems had been restored, including the Government24 public services portal and parts of Korea Post’s financial services. However, officials stated that 96 directly affected systems will take longer to bring back online, and a full recovery timeline remains uncertain.
One worker sustained first-degree burns in the incident.
Government Response
Prime Minister Kim Min-seok issued a formal apology for the disruption, admitting the risks of concentrating critical systems in a single facility. In response, President Lee Jae Myung ordered urgent improvements to strengthen the resilience and security of government IT systems.
This marks the second major data center fire in South Korea in just three years. In 2022, a blaze at another facility disrupted KakaoTalk, the country’s most widely used messaging platform, affecting nearly 50 million users.
