South Korea's government now thinks it will be about two weeks before the last of its intranet services are restored, after what is presumed to have been a botched Friday-night UPS replacement.
By Monday evening local time, the government said it had fully restored around a tenth of the several hundred different systems affected, four days after a government-run data centre caught fire.
Some departments are only partially operational, sometimes using paper-based backup processes, and some cross-department functions will seemingly require significant reengineering, according to local reporting.
Systems affected ranged from a website that sells commemorative stamps to authentication services for entire departments. Citizens lost the ability to summon emergency services by text, and some financial transactions were affected, with bank tellers on Monday resorting to phoning a government helpline to identify customers.
Investigations are still underway, but the government believes the root cause was scheduled work to move a UPS from a fifth-floor computer room to the basement of the Daejeon National Information Resources Service, a key part of South Korea's government backbone.
Less water, more flame
Some 40 minutes after a group of 13 external contractors started that job, the Chosun Daily reported, one battery threw off sparks. The resulting fire took almost a full day to extinguish.
With hundreds of batteries stacked in close proximity to servers, firefighters apparently used minimal water, which may be why the fire restarted several times.
At the last count, 384 battery packs burned up, damaging 740 servers.
The government expressed surprise at discovering that it had no failover plan, and is now investigating why batteries were in use beyond their recommended lifespan.
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