A battery explosion wiped out the data of 750,000 South Korean civil servants for seven years and paralyzed the public system. But there was no backup?
A fire at the National Information Resources Institute (NIRS) Daejeon Data Center in South Korea paralyzed 647 government systems, and 750,000 civil servants' documents for seven years were destroyed, with only 15% recovered, highlighting gaps in backup and resilience.
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Contents of this article
The explosion of a lithium battery directly paralyzed the Korean digital government. What can we learn from it? At the end of September, a fire broke out in the computer room of the National Information Resources Management Institute (NIRS) headquarters in Daejeon, 140 kilometers away from Seoul. The flames quickly engulfed the server cabinets, causing the shutdown of 647 government business systems and the permanent disappearance of 858TB of files accumulated by about 750,000 civil servants over seven years.
The fire caused the total loss of government files
It is understood that these documents were stored in a government system called G-Drive, where South Korean civil servants have been required to centralize their work files since 2018. Since the system has no external or offline backup, once the hardware is damaged, the files cannot be restored.
After the fire, government emails, legal databases, and Government24 services were all offline. The impact covered basic services such as personnel, taxation, police, and mobile digital identity. Even emergency response GPS tracking and postal banking operations were also affected. According to local reports, only 101 systems had been restored by October 1, a recovery rate of 15.6%.
The president apologized, pointing out that "there is no emergency plan at all"
On September 28, President Lee Jae-myung apologized to the nation, saying frankly that he was "deeply sorry." He also criticized the government for encountering a power grid failure in 2023 but failing to establish a feasible contingency plan. This disaster was "completely foreseeable but unprepared."
"It's not that the plan failed, but that there was no plan at all."
Secretary of the Ministry of Administrative and Security Kim Min-jae revealed that the government has selected a cloud service provider to move 96 damaged systems to the Daegu branch center, hoping to restart them within a month. However, in addition to hardware reconstruction, what is even more troublesome is the lack of external backup of seven-year official files, which creates long-term risks for daily administration, policy tracking and judicial audit.
Decentralized storage: eradicating the risk of "single point of failure"
The root cause of this disaster lies in the "centralized storage" of data. Since the platform (G-Drive) has no external backup, all data stored on it has been lost.
It does not mean that you must use blockchain technology, but you really should learn the importance of distributed storage to ensure that when any one or several nodes (i.e. data centers) are destroyed due to fire, terrorist attack or any reason, the impact on the integrity and availability of the entire data network can be controlled to a minimum and the risk of "single point of failure" is eradicated.
South Korea’s painful lesson reminds policymakers: digital efficiency is important, but resilience is the last line of defense to preserve national memory and public services.
