A lithium battery fire at the National Information Resources Service (NIRS) in Daejeon has impacted 96 core systems, affecting 647 government services, according to ministers.
The fire started in one of the NIRS data centre’s server rooms at around 8:20pm on Friday 26 September. As of 4pm Monday, 73 of the affected services had been restored. The South Korean government said it will take up to a month to fully recover the core systems damaged in the fire.
The Daejeon Metropolitan Police Agency said it had brought in 20 specialised forensic investigators, including three lithium battery experts, to speed up its efforts in determining what started the fire. The six lithium-ion batteries suspected to be the initial point of ignition have all been moved to the National Forensic Service for precise forensic analysis.
The Daejeon Metropolitan Police Agency announced on the 1st that it is investigating four individuals—one on-site management employee from the National Information Resources Service, one site manager from a company contracted for the battery relocation project, one battery relocation worker, and one representative from a supervisory company—on suspicion of negligence resulting in fire. The booked employee from the management institute is part of the on-site management staff but is not a safety management supervisor.
Police are proceeding with the investigation, believing that the workers and related parties are responsible for the fire based on their statements. The police stated, “There are many aspects that need further investigation regarding other related parties, so the number of booked individuals may increase in the future.”
The NIRS serves as the backbone of South Korea’s e-government system, integrating and operating the IT infrastructure for central ministries and local governments according to Asia News Network. Of the 647 impacted systems, 96 were directly destroyed in the fire, while 551 were shut down pre-emptively to prevent further heat damage.
Of the 96 destroyed systems only one had no backed up data, this was the ‘G-Drive’. Similar to Google Drive, the ‘government’ drive stored up to 30GB of data per public official with stored data amounting to 858TB – equivalent to nearly 450 billion A4 sheets, according to the Chosun. A source from the Ministry of the Interior and Safety said, “The G-Drive couldn’t have a backup system due to its large capacity,” and added, “The remaining 95 systems have backup data in online or offline forms.”
With some 1,600 systems distributed across three sites – Daejeon, Gwangju and Daegu – around 40% are based at the Daejeon site. Some government services offered through the Gwangju and Daegu headquarters continued, but the inability of the civil application services to switch over in real time highlighted the absence of a “twin server” architecture – a real-time backup system that mirrors the primary one to ensure uninterrupted service during outages. Information security experts said this highlighted a critical weakness in Korea’s data management framework.
Battery fires
According to a report by IDTechEx: “This incident is particularly severe, but there have been many similar incidents throughout the battery energy storage system (BESS) industry. Although the rate of battery fires per GWh deployed has decreased, the total number remains significant when summed over all battery deployments, due to the increasing number of deployments in data centres, electric vehicles, and other applications.
“In large-scale deployments with hundreds of packs and thousands of cells, as in the Daejeon city data centre, the results of thermal runaway can be catastrophic; critically from a safety perspective but also from a financial perspective for the owner, not to mention the disruption to and security of services that data centres provide.
“According to the National Fire Agency, in the first half of 2025 there have been 296 battery fire incidents in South Korea, leading to 23 casualties and 22.4 billion KRW in damages. This includes electric vehicle batteries, consumer electronics batteries, secondary batteries and primary batteries of varying chemistries.
“The circumstances around this fire indicate a lack of industry safety standards in place at the factory. This event shows the dangers of battery fires, and the negative perception that major incidents such as this can generate. Korea has had many problems with battery fires in the past – a series of battery fires in 2018 led to significant stagnation in its BESS industry at that time, as well as product freezes, and indirectly resulted in the creation of the EPRI battery fire database, which monitors battery fire incidents in BESS around the world.
“The report goes on to highlight three avenues through which battery safety can be improved: thermal management improvements – using, for example, liquid cooling systems and aerosol fire suppressants; improved diagnostics and monitoring – diagnostic sensors to monitor cells and packs for state of health, etc; and alternative energy storage technologies – lithium-ion technology could be replaced with redox flow batteries, which, although more expensive have lower levelized-cost-of-storage and have non-flammable electrolyte.
“IDTechEx’s position is that only with effective, globally adopted, safety standards can the identified solutions be practically applied to prevent catastrophes such as in Daejon City.”
