This article is by Cho Mun-gyu and read by an artificial voice.



The government on Wednesday lowered its disaster alert level for public data systems from "serious" to "alert" as recovery efforts following a fire at the National Information Resources Service (NIRS) in Daejeon reached near completion.

The Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters (CDSCH), which had been activated due to widespread system outages, was also deactivated after 40 days of operation.

Minister of the Interior and Safety Yun Ho-jung announced the decision during a CDSCH meeting at the government complex in Sejong.

"All Tier 1 and 2 systems related to public safety and essential services have been fully restored. With full recovery now in sight, we are lowering the disaster alert level," he said.

The CDSCH was relaunched on Sept. 27, the day after a fire broke out at the NIRS' Daejeon headquarters, disrupting hundreds of government IT systems. The response system will now transition to a contingency management team to continue monitoring the situation.

Yun emphasized the need for ongoing vigilance.

"We will continue to hold regular review meetings under the contingency framework and maintain tight oversight until complete normalization is achieved," he said.



As of 6 a.m. Thursday, 676 of 709 affected administrative systems had been restored, representing a 95.3 percent recovery rate, according to the CDSCH.

Yun said the 693 systems undergoing restoration at the Daejeon center are expected to be fully recovered by Nov. 20. Systems being transferred and restored at the Daegu center are scheduled for completion by December, with infrastructure deployment already under way.

The government also pledged to implement structural reforms to prevent similar incidents in the future.

"This incident has served as a wake-up call about the vulnerabilities in our digital infrastructure," Yun said. "We will fundamentally redesign our system grading protocols and redundancy mechanisms to overhaul how government IT systems are built and operated."

This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.