Chaos in the country! Fire destroys public documents
A fire at the National Information Resources Service in Daejeon, South Korea, has led to the permanent deletion of documents belonging to more than 191 thousand public employees.
12punto
In the fire that occurred on September 26, the central government's document storage system, "G Drive," was completely destroyed. The Ministry of the Interior confirmed that G Drive was one of the 96 systems affected by the fire. Since 2018, public employees had been encouraged to save their documents to this cloud system, but the system had not been backed up externally.
Lim Jeong-gyu, head of the Public Service Department, emphasized the severity of the situation by stating, "Because the system was not backed up externally, all stored documents were lost and there is no way to recover them." While external backups ensure data is protected by being copied to a different environment, the lack of this protection for G Drive resulted in a massive data loss.
The fire broke out as a result of an explosion during the transport of lithium-ion batteries. Fortunately, there was no loss of life, but the server racks housing G Drive were completely incinerated. This system provided 30 GB of storage space to approximately 125 thousand public employees and contained critical data for 163 public services.
The fire caused operational disruptions in many public institutions, especially with the destruction of G Drive, which hosted work files for 30 ministries. While there are 750 thousand public employees across the country, approximately 191 thousand civil servants were accessing the system as of August 2025.
It is stated that some documents may be retrieved via the Onnara System, the government's intranet. Lim expressed that if the system is operated at full capacity, a significant portion of the documents could be recovered.
The other 95 systems damaged in the fire were backed up, and the vast majority of the 647 systems at the center were performing regular backups. However, G Drive's lack of backup caused slowdowns in many government systems, including tax returns and email services. Officials stated that it could take a month for some services to be fully restored.