What a South Korean Data‑Center Fire Reveals About Cloud Reliability and Disaster Recovery

More than 60 Korean e‑government and financial services were knocked offline after a fire broke out at the National Information Resources Service (NIRS) data center, but most have since been restored.

How the fire started

At around 20:20 local time on Friday, a routine maintenance operation in Daejeon triggered a fire caused by a lithium‑ion battery in the UPS system, reportedly supplied by LG Energy Solution. The explosion caused thermal runaway, releasing extreme heat and prompting a massive response from 170 firefighters and 63 fire trucks. After 22 hours, the blaze was contained.

Impact on critical public services

The incident disrupted 96 of the 647 public services hosted by NIRS, including the Government24 portal, MyData identity‑verification service, and numerous tax, customs, police, and fire‑department systems.

As of October 1, only 101 services (15.6%) had been restored. The government plans to rebuild the 96 destroyed systems at a branch in Daegu, a process expected to take about four weeks.

Loss of cloud‑based data storage

The fire also destroyed the “G‑Drive” cloud repository used by central‑government civil servants, which stored an estimated 858 TB of data—equivalent to billions of A4 pages. The G‑Drive, mandated since 2018, provides roughly 30 GB per employee, but usage varies across departments.

Battery safety concerns

The Korean Fire Service confirmed that all 384 lithium‑ion batteries in the UPS were destroyed. Nationwide, battery‑related fires have risen sharply, with 296 incidents in the first half of this year and a total of 543 incidents reported in 2024.

2020: 292 incidents

2021: 319 incidents

2022: 345 incidents

2023: 359 incidents

2024: 543 incidents

These figures highlight a growing trend and the urgent need for stronger battery safety measures.

Calls for stronger disaster‑recovery measures

President Yoon Sae‑myung publicly apologized for the inconvenience and anxiety caused to citizens, emphasizing the necessity of data‑recovery plans and dual‑system redundancy. Officials noted that the NIRS, which also runs a secondary data center and uses VMware Cloud Foundation, may be able to restore virtual infrastructure more quickly.