A fire caused by a lithium-ion battery explosion at a key government data center in South Korea has knocked out more than 600 essential services, disrupting daily life in the highly digitalized country.
The incident began Friday night at the National Information Resources Center (NIRS) in the city of Daejeon, affecting systems for postal banking, mobile identification, tax collection and emergency services.
The fire started around 8:20 p.m. local time when a disconnected battery exploded during transportation operations. The explosion caused a “thermal vent,” creating intense heat that hampered firefighting efforts for nearly 10 hours.
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To prevent the servers from overheating and causing further damage, authorities took precautionary measures and shut down all 647 government IT systems housed in the Daejeon center. The fire was completely extinguished on Saturday night, but the heat in the server room delayed immediate restoration.
Critical services were paralyzed by the fire in the data center
The nationwide shutdown paralyzed essential public services. Mobile identification systems, used in place of physical IDs, were not working, affecting travelers at airports.
The national postal service's banking functions collapsed , blocking card payments and money transfers, while emergency services lost critical location-tracking capabilities for the 119 rescue system.
Government email networks and the national legal database also went down.
South Korea's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Security is leading recovery efforts, prioritizing services based on public safety and economic impact.
Security Minister Yun Hojung confirmed that to date, 46 services have already been restored, including the main government service portal, Government24 , and part of Korea Post 's financial systems .
However, authorities said 96 of the systems directly affected by the fire will be more difficult to restart and a full recovery timeline remains uncertain. One worker suffered first-degree burns during the incident.
Prime Minister Kim Min-seok issued a public apology for the systems outage, acknowledging the vulnerabilities exposed by concentrating critical systems in a single facility.
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In response to the crisis, President Lee Jae Myung has ordered “significant improvement” in the security of government systems to prevent future outages.
How does one facility create so many problems?
The fire at the National Information Resource Center in South Korea has highlighted the dangers of a country’s reliance on centralized digital infrastructure. A seemingly isolated technical failure—the explosion of a lithium battery—was enough to shut down more than 600 critical services, leaving millions of citizens without essential tools for daily life.
The incident raises serious questions about the resilience of national data centers and the way governments and organizations design security systems. It is no coincidence that authorities are now openly talking about the need for “significant improvements,” as the concentration of dozens of vital systems in a single facility has proven to be a significant risk.
It is worth emphasizing that South Korea is not just a digitally advanced country, but a society that bases almost all of its functions – from banking to political identification – on online infrastructure. When these “go down”, everyday life is suspended, and citizens’ trust takes a serious hit.
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This incident is the second major data center fire in South Korea in three years, following a fire in 2022 that disrupted the popular messaging app KakaoTalk for 50 million users.
The new fire shows that systemic weaknesses have not yet been addressed. The reliance on lithium-ion batteries, with their known thermal runaway risks, and the lack of adequate redundancy plans reveal gaps in planning and preparedness.
