According to Yonhap News, following the fire at the National Information Resource Management Center last year, the government announced that it had achieved '100% recovery' of its systems. However, this claim has been criticized as unrelated to the actual percentage of recovered data.
On September 26, 2025, a fire broke out in a lithium-ion battery in the basement of the data center at the National Information Resource Management Center in Daejeon. The fire caused a power outage, leading to the simultaneous shutdown of 709 government administrative information systems, including Government 24 and the National Complaint Center. Although the fire was extinguished, significant losses of computing equipment and data storage devices resulted in an unprecedented disruption of the national administrative network.
According to data submitted by Jin Jong-o, a member of the National Assembly's Administrative Safety Committee, the fire affected 709 systems and resulted in a total data loss of 878.36 terabytes (TB).
Of this, the government work storage space 'G Drive' accounted for 98.82% of the total, or 868 TB. The G Drive was used by approximately 190,000 civil servants across 74 central administrative agencies. During the fire, both the original and backup data were stored in the same location without distributed storage, making recovery of the G Drive data impossible. The data from the remaining 708 systems amounted to about 10.36 TB (1.18%).
The Ministry of the Interior and Safety announced on December 30, 2025, that the 709 systems affected by the fire had been '100% recovered.' However, since recovery of the G Drive data is essentially impossible, it has been replaced with a new system.
Jin argued that the government's claim of '100% recovery' refers to the normal operation of the systems, not the recovery of lost data. He stated, 'Restarting the system and recovering lost work materials are entirely different issues,' and urged the government to conduct a comprehensive investigation and publicly disclose the actual scale of data loss and recovery across the 74 agencies.
* This article has been translated by AI.
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