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A notice about the suspension of mobile entry passes is posted at the entrance of the Government Complex Seoul in Jongno-gu, Seoul, on Sept. 29, as the nationwide network outage continues for the fourth day following a fire at the National Information Resources Service’s main data center in Daejeon. / Source: Yonhap News

The government said 73 of the 647 public information systems knocked offline by a fire at the National Information Resources Service (NIRS) headquarters in Daejeon had been restored as of 4 p.m. on Sept. 29. Core citizen-facing services—such as Government24 for resident registry extracts, Korea Post’s finance and logistics systems, and mobile ID—were prioritized and are back online. But 96 systems directly affected by the blaze must be migrated to a public-private cloud at the Daegu center, a process expected to take about a month.

At a briefing in Sejong on Monday, Vice Interior Minister Kim Min-jae apologized “for the inconvenience caused by many systems that remain unrecovered,” adding that the 96 systems hit by the fire “will be installed in the public-private cloud zone in Daegu,” with “two weeks to prepare information resources and another two weeks to build the systems, for a total of four weeks.”

Of the systems restored so far, 16 are classified as Tier-1, representing 44.4% of that category. For services expected to be offline for an extended period, the government is running offline alternatives. Complaints to the e-People petition portal and integrated veterans’ services can be submitted in person or by mail, while national statutes can be accessed via the National Assembly’s legislative platform.

Deadlines for paying local property taxes and submitting documents are being extended, and all offline issuance fees are fully waived. The 110 and 120 call centers and major portals Naver and Daum are guiding users to workarounds, while agencies have activated “dedicated civil-complaint support teams” to handle urgent cases.

As recovery continues, revelations that the Board of Audit and Inspection warned just nine days before the fire about the risk of recurring network failures have fueled criticism that the outage amounts to “man-made disaster.” In a Sept. 17 notice to the Science Ministry, the Interior Ministry and the NIRS conveying findings from its audit of the 2023 nationwide administrative network paralysis, the board cautioned that failures could “spread nationwide,” urging stronger prevention measures.

In November 2023, 189 administrative information systems—including Government24—simultaneously went down, drawing harsh rebukes over poor NIRS maintenance and inspections. The audit then found that aging equipment such as routers caused the outage and noted failure rates surge after four years in service. NIRS had kept devices in operation for up to nine years, and an aged battery is again being cited as a likely cause of the current fire.

A longstanding weakness—insufficient redundancy across critical IT assets—also appears to have gone unaddressed. Experts say agencies should keep hot-standby equipment and robust disaster-recovery systems so that if one unit fails, another immediately takes over with no service interruption. In this case, those basic safeguards were not in place.