Battery fire in data centre:Hundreds of state IT services in South Korea offline
A fire at a state data centre in South Korea has paralysed more than 600 IT services. The centre is currently being reopened and will probably take weeks.
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After a fire at a data center in South Korea took more than 600 government IT services offline, the process of getting them back online is still ongoing. The Korea Times reports that 47 of 647 affected services have been restored so far. The Minister of the Interior has apologized for the consequences and, at the same time, admitted that the immediate resumption of almost 100 services is likely to be particularly difficult. This will require two weeks. When restoring the remaining services, those that have a direct impact on people's safety and economic activities will be prioritized.
Various consequences of the outages
The fire broke out on Friday at the headquarters of the South Korean government's National Information Resources Service in the city of Daejeon, the newspaper reports. The cause was an ignition in a lithium-ion battery for the uninterruptible power supply during a battery change. As a result, 384 batteries were destroyed and 100 people had to be evacuated. It took the fire brigade almost 22 hours to extinguish the fire completely. As a result, hundreds of government online services went offline, and it is likely to be some time before the problems are fully resolved. IT services for internal and external use are affected.
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According to the report, the outages affected platforms for social welfare, government services, the post office, and for submitting petitions, among others. However, as verification services for the financial sector are also unavailable, the fire has already had consequences for banks, for example, where accounts cannot be set up. There may also be delays in state-guaranteed mortgages, pensions, and loans due to the outages, writes the newspaper. According to the newspaper, services based on hardware that was not installed on the burned-down floor should be put back into operation as quickly as possible. The government has ordered that everything possible should be done to restore services.
(mho)
