Reference News Network, October 11 report: According to the "Nikkei Shimbun" on October 10, a fire broke out at a government-managed data center in South Korea on September 26, causing system disruptions including some administrative services. Nearly two weeks after the fire, the repair work is still ongoing, and the problem of insufficient backup systems has also damaged the image of the "digital government."

The fire occurred at the National Information Resources Management Institute in Daejeon, central South Korea. According to South Korean media, the fire was caused by sparks from removing lithium-ion batteries that needed to be replaced in the server room.

According to information from the South Korean government, 709 government systems were disrupted due to the fire. The resident registration system, equivalent to Japan's "personal number" system, was once paralyzed, causing failures in financial, postal, medical, and disaster services related to daily life.

Despite the South Korean government's efforts to restore services during the Mid-Autumn Festival holiday, as of the 9th, the system recovery rate was only 27%.

South Korean media criticized the government's response, saying "the digital government was brought down by a single battery." On October 3, the main newspaper Chosun Ilbo published an editorial stating, "This incident indicates the need to re-examine the management system of information infrastructure."

This is not the first time South Korea has experienced large-scale system failures due to disasters. In October 2022, a fire broke out at a data center near Seoul, causing serious communication interruptions in the instant messaging application KakaoTalk, owned by the internet giant Kakao.

The KakaoTalk service, used by more than 90% of South Korean population, along with payment and ride-hailing services, simultaneously crashed, raising concerns about the vulnerability of digital services during disasters. At that time, the government instructed Kakao to set up an external system with the same environment as the existing servers and cloud services so that it could immediately establish the same functionality when a failure occurred.

After the 2022 incident, the South Korean government issued instructions to private companies to establish emergency backup systems, but similar instructions were not implemented within government facilities. In addition, there are management deficiencies in government agencies, such as aging data center buildings and batteries exceeding their service life.

Some practices of the South Korean government have also been criticized, such as backups being limited to a small number of key data. The government had encouraged civil servants to store work documents in the cloud rather than on personal devices, but some data without backups was completely lost in the fire.

According to South Korean media, currently, only 125,000 civil servants from 74 ministries use cloud storage, which is 17% of the total. The fire resulted in the loss of 858 terabytes (TB) of data accumulated over eight years.

It is reported that the Personnel Reform Office, responsible for internal personnel management of the government, suffered heavy losses in this fire. However, since all staff members used cloud services, they are currently trying to find and recover files in work equipment and email records.

The system failures caused by the fire and the loss of government documents have become a focal point of debate between the ruling party and the opposition. The ruling Democratic Party believes that the previous Yoon Suk-yeol government failed to take the issue seriously even after the 2022 Kakao data center fire.

A member of the opposition People Power Party posted on social media on October 3: "The people have suffered consecutive losses, but the president remained silent for two consecutive days, neither presiding over a meeting nor visiting the fire scene." (Translated by Liu Lin)

Original: https://www.toutiao.com/article/7559806615688364553/

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