Procurement agency's online system shuts down for 1 hour

ㅆhe Public Procurement Service's online e-procurement system, known as KONEPS. [YONHAP]

The Public Procurement Service's online system was disrupted for an hour on Tuesday, adding to the series of recurrent failures in government agencies' online systems.

The agency's e-procurement system, known as Koneps, which was down for an hour, is integral to handling the entire public procurement process online, including bid posting from public institutions.

The incident follows a major disruption of the public administrative network on Nov. 17, which handles important government documents, including those pertaining to one's IDs and family relations.

The November outage caused significant inconvenience, as vital documents, such as resident IDs, are essential for tasks like taking out loans and signing housing contracts.

The system took several days to fully recover from the crash, which the Ministry of Interior and Safety attributed to a server failure, dismissing concerns of a potential hacking incident.

This is the second time the procurement agency's system was halted since the Nov. 17 outage, as it experienced a server failure on Nov. 23, when it was also down for an hour.

Some speculate that the disruption is due to a cyberattack as there was a surge in traffic originating from overseas.

However, the National Information Resources Service, responsible for operating the government's online system, said it's unlikely the disruption is a result of a cyberattack.

It said the system was down, not crashed, distinguishing it from the blackout the public administrative network experienced in November.

BY LEE HO-JEONG [lee.hojeong@joongang.co.kr]