This article is by Kim Min-wook and read by an artificial voice.



"The fire was extinguished only on Saturday morning, and the heat inside the affected server room has yet to dissipate fully," NIRS Director Lee Jae-yong said at a briefing in Seoul on Saturday. "We have not yet begun restoration work."

Lee added that the timeline for recovery remains uncertain.

"We will only be able to determine how long it will take once we inspect the servers and begin restarting them. It's too early to say when services can resume."

The fire occurred in a fifth-floor server room housing both key government servers and uninterruptible power supply (UPS) batteries. When the HVAC system failed during the fire, the agency took preemptive action by shutting down all systems in the Daejeon center - including those not directly impacted - to prevent further damage.

This led to a complete halt of all 647 systems managed by the center, including Government24, the Korea Post, the e-People petition portal and the Ministry of the Interior and Safety's website. A total of 70 systems are reported to have been directly affected by the fire.



"The sequence, procedures, inter-agency connections - all of these are intricately linked," Lee said. "We will need to physically enter the site and verify each system based on its specific reactivation process."

In response to the service outages, the government has requested that related agencies extend deadlines for civil services, such as tax payments and document submissions, until after the systems are fully restored. However, no timeline has been provided for when critical services, such as postal banking and Government24, will resume.

"We are prioritizing the restoration of key services with broad public impact, including postal banking and delivery," Vice Minister of the Interior and Safety Kim Min-jae said,

The government issued a nationwide emergency alert via text at 8 a.m. Saturday to inform the public of the ongoing service disruptions. A public notice was also posted on the portal site Naver, directing users to currently available alternative platforms.

"We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience and disappointment this has caused," Kim said. "We are doing everything we can to restore services quickly and stabilize the situation."

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.