A fire on Friday at a state data center in South Korea caused a nationwide outage to hundreds of key government services, leaving officials racing to restore them throughout the next day.

On Saturday, ministry websites, needed to obtain official documents for a variety of purposes, were down. The national postal service switched to processing mail offline, threatening to create a delay in delivery. Mobile identification cards, used widely instead of physical cards, were inaccessible. Many government employees’ email services were down.

The blaze at the National Information Resources Service in Daejeon, a central South Korean city, started around 8:15 p.m. local time on Friday, when one of the lithium batteries supplying power to the facility’s computers exploded during maintenance work, Kim Min-jae, the vice interior minister, said at a news conference on Saturday.

It gets worse. For a lot of documents, there are no backups.

NIRS fire destroys government's cloud storage system, no backups available

The fire broke out in the server room on the fifth floor of the center, damaging 96 information systems designated as critical to central government operations, including the G-Drive platform. The G-Drive has been in use since 2018, requiring government officials to store all work documents in the cloud instead of on personal computers. It provided around 30 gigabytes of storage per person.

The scale of damage varies by agency. The Ministry of Personnel Management, which had mandated that all documents be stored exclusively on G-Drive, was hit hardest. The Office for Government Policy Coordination, which used the platform less extensively, suffered comparatively less damage.

The Personnel Ministry stated that all departments are expected to experience work disruptions. It is currently working to recover alternative data using any files saved locally on personal computers within the past month, along with emails, official documents and printed records.

Not sure this is all connected, but there was a second fire nearby:

Second data center in a week catches fire in Daejeon, South Korea

According to a report from Korea JoongAng Daily, officials believe the fire started in the uninterruptible power supply (UPS) on the second floor of the building, and believe the battery in the UPS may have been to blame, though an investigation is ongoing and police intend to question Lotte staff.

Meanwhile:

A breach every month raises doubts about South Korea’s digital defenses

South Korea is world-famous for its blazing-fast internet, near-universal broadband coverage, and as a leader in digital innovation, hosting global tech brands like Hyundai, LG, and Samsung. But this very success has made the country a prime target for hackers and exposed how fragile its cybersecurity defenses remain.

The country is reeling from a string of high-profile hacks, affecting credit card companies, telecoms, tech startups, and government agencies, impacting vast swathes of the South Korean population. In each case, ministries and regulators appeared to scramble in parallel, sometimes deferring to one another rather than moving in unison.