SEOUL (Reuters) -A fire at South Korea’s national state data centre late on Friday knocked out some online government services as authorities fought to put out the blaze and bring the network back online.
Some government ministries, the mobile identification system, the postal service, and the government legal database were among websites that remained down on Saturday after the fire at the National Information Resources Services in the city of Daejeon, about 140 km (86 miles) from the capital Seoul.
Prime Minister Kim Min-seok told an emergency meeting late on Friday a swift recovery of services was essential. The government must make all information on any service disruption available to the public, his office said.
One person has been treated for a minor injury, a fire official told a late-night press briefing. There was considerable fire damage at the location of the initial blaze in the data centre building, fire official Kim Ki-seon said.
The blaze was started by lithium-ion batteries on the fifth floor of the building, the fire official said.
Firefighters were constrained by the risk of further damaging servers in the initial response, he said.
The national data service acts as a cloud server for many government services and databases for the heavily wired country. It operates data centres in other locations in the country.
(Reporting by Jack KimEditing by Bill Berkrot)
