South Korea is digitally sophisticated, technically capable and deeply invested in modern digital government systems. In September 2025, when a fire tore through a government-linked data centre in Daejeon, what followed was a clear failure of state capacity. Around 745 government systems were affected, many taking months to return to service. More alarmingly, about 858 terabytes of government data was lost permanently. Parts of the system had no effective backup. South Korea’s incident was not the result of a cyberattack or foreign sabotage. It was reportedly triggered by a battery fire. Government systems that citizens and officials relied on suddenly stopped working, and some datasets could not be recovered at all. By any practical definition of resilience, that should trouble us.
South Korea held data domestically—and lost it in a fire | The Strategist
