Gov't administrative network restored after major disruption

Social Affairs

Published: 19 Nov. 2023, 15:57 Updated: 20 Nov. 2023, 08:41

Gov't administrative network restored after major disruption

Notices of a system crash posted on an automated civil service machine at a district office in Seoul on Friday. Many people had trouble printing out government documents that were necessary in applying for loans and event library cards. [YONHAP]

The government restored the administrative network that suffered a system failure, officials said Sunday, two days after the breakdown caused disruptions to public access to government-approved papers.

The Saeol administrative network, a system used by public workers to access government-approved documents, was working smoothly in the afternoon, the interior ministry said.

The online Government 24 portal was also running without a glitch, processing some 240,000 cases of requests for civil documents, such as birth certificates and resident registration papers.

"The Saeol system as well as the Government 24 are working as normal, although we need to see how the situation goes on Monday as the offline service is not provided on the weekend," an official said.

Interior Minister Lee Sang-min visited the National Information Resources Service (NIRS) in Daejeon, 139 kilometers south of Seoul, where the network control center is located, and presided over a meeting to discuss the system breakdown with related agencies.

More than 100 government officials and private technicians were sent to the NIRS to restore the servers and network systems, after the system failure paralyzed both offline and online issuances of the civil documents on Friday.

The system breakdown suspended the widely used online Government 24 portal, causing massive delays in and disruptions to public access across the country.

Officials said they had replaced some of the network equipment believed to have caused the system breakdown and conducted several tests at local community centers to see if the on-site issuance of the documents was working as normal.

The Government 24 portal was temporarily restored on Saturday and accessible both on the web and mobile.

IT experts dispatched to the NIRS are trying to determine the exact cause of the system failure, officials said. A possible error from a recent system upgrade has been cited as a likely reason for the system failure.

Yonhap