According to South Korea’s Ministry of Public Administration and Security on October 1, the South Korean government’s document storage system was destroyed in a fire at the National Information Resources Service (NIRS) last week, resulting in the complete loss of all relevant work files for approximately 750,000 civil servants over the past nearly seven years.
NIRS, located in Daejeon city, about 140 km south of Seoul, is considered the central hub of South Korea’s national computer network. The facility caught fire on the evening of September 26, causing 647 government business systems to go offline, with 96 of them being destroyed.
The Ministry of Public Administration and Security stated that the government document storage system was one of the systems destroyed in the fire. Since 2018, the South Korean government has instructed civil servants to store all work-related files in this system. As the system was not externally backed up, all stored files have been lost, and it is expected that business at relevant government agencies relying on the system will be disrupted.
Preliminary information indicates that the fire was caused by an explosion of a lithium battery pack in a server room. On October 1, South Korean police arrested four people on suspicion of negligence.
