1/ South Korea is currently suffering a catastrophic digital infrastructure failure after a government data centre fire, highlighting a growing realisation that the country's digital security architecture is built on a castle of sand with no proper backup systems.
2/ The fire started at 8:15pm yesterday at the National Information Resources Service main centre in Daejeon during routine maintenance to move uninterruptible power supply batteries underground. One disconnected battery then caught fire. https://www.news1.kr/local/moi...
3/ The blaze raged for nearly 10 hours before firefighters extinguished it at 6:30am this morning. But the damage is catastrophic: 384 lithium-ion battery packs completely destroyed, servers confirmed lost, and firefighters had to break through exterior walls.
4/ When temperature/humidity control failed due to fire, officials feared servers would overheat. They made the "preemptive" decision to shut down 647 gov systems to "safely preserve information systems," according to Vice Interior Minister Kim Min-jae. https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR...
5/ 647 systems. That's nearly 40% of South Korea's entire government digital infrastructure, all housed at this single Daejeon facility. They had server disaster recovery but never completed the cloud disaster recovery system. https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR...
6/ Their G-Cloud system needed geographically separated "twin" cloud environments that could take over during disasters. Instead, they only had partial server backups and minimal storage across their three centres, in Daejeon, Gwangju and Daegu. https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR...
7/ "We cannot easily say when recovery will happen," said NIRS Director Lee Jae-yong. "This fire-related outage is different from our usual 3-hour recovery targets. Heat hasn't dissipated and we haven't even started recovery work yet."
8/ The gov has escalated crisis levels from "Caution" to "Serious" and activated the Central Disaster Safety Countermeasures Headquarters. This is the first time this top-level emergency response has ever been triggered for an IT disaster in history. https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR...
9/ Services down incl. Gov24 citizen portal, the Onnara gov intranet, postal banking, tax systems, national health insurance, and dozens more. Emergency text alerts were sent throughout the night, this one telling citizens to check service availability before visiting offices.
10/ The government's own internal systems are completely paralysed. The Onnara system - where all gov docs are written/reviewed/approved - is offline. Civil servants who came to work this weekend cannot conduct normal business because they cannot log in. https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR...
11/ The government had to post emergency citizen guidance on Naver's website because its own government portals are down. Prime Minister Kim Min-seok warned that mobile ID cards aren't working properly, potentially causing problems for airport travellers.
12/ All tax payment deadlines and document submissions have been indefinitely postponed. Citizens needing government services are being directed to "offline counters" or alternative websites.
13/ President Lee Jae Myung, who returned overnight from the UN General Assembly in New York, received reports and monitored the situation through the night, according to the presidential office. https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR...
14/ This catastrophe comes at a time when the vulnerability of government systems is already under intense scrutiny after foreign hackers, likely state-sponsored, had infiltrated government infrastructure. https://www.enki.co.kr/en/medi...
15/ Meanwhile, South Korea's critical private infrastructure has also been systematically breached, including telecoms KT, LG Uplus, and Lotte Card. https://www.koreaherald.com/ar...
16/ The infrastructure failure was predictable. The Daejeon centre is over 20 years old, established in 2005. Plans for cloud disaster recovery and facility relocation had been delayed due to budget constraints. https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR...
17/ This echoes the 2022 Kakao outage that paralysed digital payments, taxi services, and messaging for millions when a single data centre fire knocked out inadequately backed-up systems. https://x.com/koryodynasty/sta...
18/ The situation is still developing. We don't know the full extent of server damage, how long recovery will take, or what information may have been permanently lost. What we do know is that South Korea's digital government has been exposed as fundamentally vulnerable.
@koryodynasty The 🤡🤡🤡 put Li-ion batteries in with the servers
@koryodynasty A tech powerhouse, but the backbone's made of sand? This mess is a total embarrassment. Incompetence at its finest—heads should've rolled yesterday.
@koryodynasty As expected - a country good at window dressing...
@koryodynasty We will reenforce the fragility. We maintain the most advanced digital government.
@koryodynasty @threadreaderapp compile
@koryodynasty @threadreaderapp unroll
@koryodynasty so-called rare atmospheric phenomenons..
