Daejeon government data center fire (2025)
A lithium battery fire in the South Korean government's data center in September 2025 that interrupted hundreds of online public services.
Lithium batteries in UPS systems have become the leading cause of serious data center fires, because a thermal runaway spreads from one module to the next and is hard to fight with water. The risk rises during works, when batteries are moved or disconnected outside their normal operating regime. When the site hosts most of a state's services with no active replica elsewhere, a fire in one room becomes a national outage, and data without an off-site copy is lost. The case brings together three lessons of this glossary: the battery as a source of ignition, concentration on one site, and the backup that shares the fate of the original.
On September 26, 2025, a fire broke out in the data center of the National Information Resources Service in Daejeon, during work to relocate lithium UPS batteries; several hundred online government systems were interrupted, and the government acknowledged the loss of data from an internal storage service that had no external copy.
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