112 online gov't services restored after data center fire
Interior Minister Yun Ho-jung speaks during a meeting on the data center fire and its aftermath at the Government Complex Seoul, Thursday. Yonhap
A total of 112 online government services have been restored in the wake of an outage caused by last week's fire at the state data management agency, the government said Thursday.
As of 12 p.m., the restoration rate stood at 17.3 percent after 112 of the 647 services affected by Friday's fire at the National Information Resources Service (NIRS) in Daejeon, about 140 kilometers south of Seoul, were brought back online, it said.
Interior Minister Yun Ho-jung said the government will go all-out to recover the services throughout the extended Chuseok holiday that begins Friday.
"We are gravely aware that the current restoration rate falls short of the people's expectations," he said during a meeting of the government's Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters. "The government has taken steps to dispatch civilian experts and research agency personnel to the site (of the fire) in order to fully mobilize personnel and funds and accelerate the restoration rate."
Vice Interior Minister Kim Min-jae said officials were focusing on speeding up restoration efforts by replacing the uninterruptible power supply system at the NIRS and relocating equipment at the server room where the fire started.
The government is also pushing for the restoration of 96 systems destroyed in the fire by Oct. 28. The systems will be newly set up at a data center in the southeastern city of Daegu.
Kim said the government would tap into reserve funds in order to ensure a swift recovery process. The interior ministry began talks with the finance ministry Wednesday to use such funds.
Meanwhile, the blaze has raised concerns over major losses of data after a government document storage system, known as G Drive, was found to have been destroyed.
The system, which was not backed up externally, had been used by 74 government agencies and some 191,000 civil servants.
Lee Yong-suk, head of the ministry's digital government innovation office, acknowledged the lack of an external backup as a mistake, vowing to establish a new system that would not have such issues.
Police said they launched a raid on the NIRS and three companies as part of their investigation into the cause of the blaze.
Investigators began the search at 9 a.m. over suspicions of occupational negligence, a day after the police booked four individuals, including an NIRS on-site manager, on the same suspicions.
The fire began after a lithium-ion battery exploded in a server room on the fifth floor of the NIRS and was completely extinguished Saturday.