After data center fire, Seoul officials go back to basics in preparedness drill

A Seoul city official processes paperwork by hand during a drill at Seoul City Hall in Jung District, central Seoul, Tuesday. Courtesy of Seoul Metropolitan Government

Earlier this week, everything felt as if it had reverted to the Stone Age for Eom Seo-hee, a 30-year-old official working in the Seoul city government’s Information System Division.

Instead of processing paperwork digitally, Eom received official documents by email, printed them out, filled them in by hand, obtained handwritten approvals, and then scanned and emailed the completed forms back to the relevant department.

“I had never seen handwritten paperwork in my life,” Eom told The Korea Times. “I barely even knew it existed, and I had no idea how it was handled.”

Eom was among roughly 19,000 Seoul city officials across 720 departments who took part in a Tuesday-to-Thursday drill — the first of its kind in the country — aimed at ensuring that public and administrative services could continue even in the event of a major computer outage or system failure.

As part of this week’s drill, officials simulated a scenario in which the city’s internal portal and work management systems were treated as offline. In that setting, Seoul city officials like Eom handled public complaints and internal approvals in accordance with the city’s standardized manual for processing documents by hand.

The city government issued the manual last October, a month after a lithium-ion battery fire hit the National Information Resources Service in Daejeon, which operates the country’s data center and network security system.

The blaze disrupted 709 administrative systems, including Gov24, the state portal for administrative services, and postal banking services, and took three months to fully restore.

Firefighters collect all of the burned lithium-ion batteries after a fire at the National Information Resources Service in Yuseong District, Daejeon, Sept. 27, 2025. Newsis

“Even before the blaze, we had been working on the manual because we thought something like this could happen,” said Park Mi-hee, the city’s information systems planning manager. “Then the fire broke out at the government data center, and it pushed us to speed up drafting and distributing the manual.”

The city government said many officials hired in recent years have little or no experience handling handwritten documents or processing paper approvals since Seoul expanded electronic document distribution across all departments in 1999.

“To reduce reliance on a few experienced staff (in the event of a system failure), Seoul formalized handwritten procedures in a standard manual so all officials — regardless of seniority or generation — can respond immediately under the same rules,” the city government said.

The city’s manual details how to shift drafting, approvals, filing and delivery to a paper-based process during a system failure. It also includes rules for document numbering, registration logs and seal-required exceptions, as well as steps to reenter and transfer records once systems are restored.

The city government said the manual is designed to preserve administrative validity and records management during a system failure.

The drill proved valuable for Eom.

“Now that I’ve done it, I know what to do if the work management system goes down — how to receive documents and process them by hand,” Eom said.

“I expected handling everything manually would be extremely difficult, but the manual’s guidelines were clear,” Eom said. “Following them took less time than I expected, and I didn’t run into major difficulties.”

Kang Ok-hyun, director of Seoul’s Digital City Bureau, said the manual is not just paperwork guidance but the nation’s first standardized administrative response that can be put to immediate use during disasters or system failures.

“Even if information systems are temporarily disrupted, the administrative services citizens rely on must not stop for a single moment,” Kang said.